Annals of Advertising #6, The Animal Kingdom #12

Nestlé sells milk through feline anthropomorphism. (ca. 1910)

Cinema #36

Max cigarette card (published ca. 1935-1938)

Art #15

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane.

The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of. Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap, representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal 'art coefficient' contained in the work.

In other works, the personal "art coefficient" is like a arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.

To avoid a misunderstanding, we must remember that this 'art coefficient' is a personal expression of art à l'état brut, that is, still in a raw state, which must be 'refined' as pure sugar from molasses by the spectator; the digit of this coefficient has no bearing whatsoever on his verdict. The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation: through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubtantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale.

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.

Marcel Duchamp, "The Creative Act" (1957)

Seasons #3, D is for Dickinson #4

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —

Who ponder this tremendous scene —
This whole Experiment of Green —
As if it were his own!

Time #14, Faulkner #7

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Quentin Compson, in The Sound and the Fury

America #36, Foreign Lands #25

La culture américaine en tant que distincte de la nôtre, comme l'est la culture chinoise, est une invention pure et simple des Européens.

American culture, as distinct from our own as is Chinese culture, is purely and simply a European invention.


André Malraux, Les Conquérants

In Memoriam #10, Cinema #35

Charlton Heston

(1924-2008)


Charlton Heston est un axiome. Il constitue à lui seul une tragedie, et sa présence dans un film, quel qu'il soit, suffit à provoquer la beauté. La violence contenue dont témoignent la sombre phosphorescence des yeux, le profil d'aigle, l'arc orgueilleux des sourcils, le saillant des pommettes, la courbe amère et dure de la bouche, la fabuleuse puissance du torse, voilà ce qui est donné, et que le pire metteur en scène ne peut avilir. C'est dans ce sens que l'on peut dire que Charlton Heston, par son existence seule en dehors de tout film donne du cinéma une définition plus que des films comme Hiroshima [Mon Amour] ou Citizen Kane dont l'esthétique ignore ou récuse Charlton Heston. Par lui, la mise en scène peut accéder aux affrontements les plus intenses et les résoudre par le mépris d'un dieu prisonnier, secoué de grondements sourds.

Michel Mourlet, “Apologie de la violence” Cahiers du cinéma (May 1960)

Anniversaries #8

Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there.

I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating President by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but "fear itself." But I wouldn't stop there.

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy."
Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee, the cry is always the same: "We want to be free."


Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

excerpt from his final speech
"I've Been to the Mountaintop" (April 3, 1968)

Assassinated, Memphis, Tennessee (April 4, 1968)

America #35, History #11

Sure you’re romantic about American history. What your professor left out of account was the fact that it’s the most romantic of all histories. It began in myth and has developed through three centuries of fairy stories. Whatever the time is in America it is always, at every moment, the mad and wayward hour when the prince is finding the little foot that alone fits into the slipper of glass. It is a little hard to know what romantic means to those who use the word umbrageously. But if the mad, impossible voyage of Columbus or Cartier or LaSalle or Coronado or John Ledyard is not romantic, if the stars did not dance in the sky when the Constitutional Convention met, if Atlantis has any landscape stranger or the other side of the moon any lights or colors or shapes more unearthly than the customary homespun of Lincoln or the morning coat of Jackson, well, I don’t know what romance is. Ours is a story mad with the impossible. It is by chaos out of dream, it began as dream and it has continued as dream down to the last headline you read in a newspaper, and of our dreams there are two things above all others to be said, that only madmen could have dreamed them or would have dared to—and that we have shown a considerable faculty for making them come true.

Bernard DeVoto to Catherine Drinker Bowen (c. 1940)

Scopitone #31

Rita Hayworth, as Gilda Mundson Farrell, sings "Who Put the Blame on Mame"
in Gilda
d: Charles Vidor (1946)

Diptych #9, Food #10, Architecture #27

On devient cuisinier mais on naît rôtisseur.

Brillat-Savarin, Aphorism No. XV


On devient ingénieur, mais on naît architecte.

Auguste Perret, Aphorism No. I

Apocalypse #13, Death #5, Time #14

The result would inevitably be a state of universal rest and death, if the universe were finite and left to obey existing laws. But it is impossible to conceive a limit to the extent of matter in the universe; and therefore science points rather to an endless progress, through an endless space, of action involving the transformation of potential energy into palpable motion and hence into heat, than to a single finite mechanism, running down like a clock, and stopping for ever.

William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat" (1862)

Time #13

The future is but the obsolete in reverse.

Vladimir Nabokov

Architecture #26, Apocalype #12

Frank Lloyd Wright, Plan for Greater Baghdad
"Dedicated to Sumeria, Isin, Larsa, and Babylon" (1958)

Plans for Crescent Opera later adapted by Talisien Associates as Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona (1962-1964)

Christianity #8, Death #3

There now hangs that sacred Body upon the Crosse, rebaptized in his owne teares and sweat and embalmed in his owne blood alive. There are those bowells of compassion, which are so conspicuous, so manifested, as that you may see them through his wounds. There those glorious eyes grew faint in their light: so as the Sun ashamed to survive them, departed with his light too. And then that Sonne of God, who was never from us, and yet had now come a new way unto us in assuming our nature, delivers that soule (which was never out of his Fathers hands) by a new way, a voluntary emission of it into his Fathers hands; For though to this God our Lord, belong’d these issues of death, so that considered in his owne contract, he must necessarily die, yet at no breach or battery, which they had made upon his sacred Body, issued his soule, but emisit, hee gave up the Ghost, and as God breathed a soule into the first Adam, so this second Adam breathed his soule into God, into the hands of God. There wee leave you in that blessed dependancy, to hang upon him that hangs upon the Crosse, there bath in his teares, there suck at his woundes, and lie downe in peace in his grave, till hee vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that Kingdome, which hee hath purchas’d for you, with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood.


John Donne, conclusion of Death’s Duel
Or, A Consolation to the Soule, Against the Dying Life, and Living Death of the Body

Delivered in a Sermon at White-Hall, before the Kings Majesty, in the beginning of Lent, 1630, Being his last Sermon, and called by Majesties household The Doctors Owne Funerall Sermon

Dead Presidents #37, D is for Daguerreotype #4

Zachary Taylor (photograph, 1844)

In Memoriam #9

Arthur C. Clarke

(1917-2008)


I see no reason to apologize for science fiction, whether intended for juvenile or adult readers. Stories of fantastic adventures in real or imaginary worlds have always been popular among all age groups and all periods of time: the explorers of peculiar planets at the edge of the Galaxy are direct descendents of Odysseus and Sinbad. Science fiction is therefore no new invention—a by-product of the atomic age.

“Sinbad in Space” (1952)

History #10, Architecture #25

But my quarrel does not lie with this isolated article by Collins. Coming directly after my return from the [Society of Architectural Historians] Baltimore Convention, it intensified a sense of dismay and protest that had accumulated during the sessions of the historians. They have succeeded in perverting the meaning of "scholarship" to a point where it indicates the exact opposite of its original function. This function was to rise by intense studies and creative contemplation to an all-inclusive knowledge of a particular field of human endeavor. What we got in Baltimore, with the exception of papers read by Horn and Millon, were minute details—proven or conjectural—bearing no relationship whatsoever to the building as a body-space-structure-context totality. It might be perfectly all right for the art iconographers to hold an International Conference to decide in how many cases the Virgin carries the Christ Child on her left biceps, and in how many cases on the right; or why one putti in an inhabited frieze swings its little foot upward while the other does it downward. Architecture is a matrix of life and not a piece of carrion to be dissected into narrower and narrower strips of dead tissue. A recent reviewer in the London Times Book Section spoke contemptuously of American scholarship as "the battle of the typewriters" which I would modify into an endurance test of "Sitzfleisch" (posterior muscle strength).

It is the tragedy of architectural historians that they try to compensate for a rampant inferiority complex vis-a-vis the older "science" of fine arts theory by aping its method, ignorant of the fact that architectural history developed and must bejudged by totally different methods and standards.


Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, letter to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, in response to Peter Collins' December 1962 article, "The Origins of Graph Paper as an Influence on Architectural Design" (February 3, 1962)

[postscript: "Footnotes on request"]

Word of the Day #24

Architecturesque

Cinema #34, Love, #20, Annals of Advertising #5

Trailer for Leave Her to Heaven
d: John M. Stahl cinematographer: Leon Shamroy (1945)

Scenes from a Life #17, Architecture #24, Art #14

The New York Herald-Tribune documents Philip Johnson and Alan Blackburn's exit from the Museum of Modern Art
(excerpted from December 18, 1934 article)

Archaeology of the Political Advertisement #3, Dead Presidents#36, D is for Daguerreotype #3

Franklin Pierce (photograph, 1851)

He comes before the people of the United States at a remarkable era in the history of this country and of the world. The two great parties of the nation appear--at least to an observer somewhat removed from both--to have nearly merged into one another; for they preserve the attitude of political antagonism rather through the effect of their old organizations, than because any great and radical principles are at present in dispute between them. The measures advocated by the one party, and resisted by the other, through a long series of years, have now ceased to be the pivots on which the election turns. The prominent statesmen, so long identified with those measures, will henceforth relinquish their controlling influence over public affairs. Both parties, it may likewise be said, are united in one common purpose--that of preserving our sacred Union, as the immovable basis from which the destinies, not of America alone, but of mankind at large, may be carried upward and consummated. And thus men stand together, in unwonted quiet and harmony, awaiting the new movement in advance which all these tokens indicate.

It remains for the citizens of this great country to decide, within the next few weeks, whether they will retard the steps of human progress by placing at its head an illustrious soldier, indeed, a patriot and one indelibly stamped into the history of the past, but who has already done his work, and has not in him the spirit of the present or of the coming time,--or whether they will put their trust in a new man, whom a life of energy and various activity has tested, but not worn out, and advance with him into the auspicious epoch upon which we are about to enter.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852)

Time #11, WCW #6, History #9

If history could be that which annihilated all memory of past things from our minds it would be a useful tyranny.

But since it lives in us practically day by day we should fear it. But if it is, as it may be, a tyranny over the souls of the dead—and so the imaginations of the living—where lies our greatest well of inspiration, our greatest hope of freedom (since the future is totally blank, if not black) we should guard it doubly from the interlopers.


Williams Carlos Williams, “The Virtue of History” in The American Grain (1925)

Dead Presidents #35, D is for Daguerreotype #2

James Buchanan, pictured as Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania. (1844)

D is for Daguerreotype #1, Catalogue of the Vanished #8

Portrait of Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852)

The Animal Kingdom #11, Architecture #34, Age of Print #5

From Rudiments of Architecture and Building, edited by John Bullock (1865)
Illustration to Book III, Chapter IV, "Imitation of Nature and Models"

Book Titles Without Context #4, Dead Presidents #34, The Animal Kingdom #10

Turkey and the United States: How They Travel a Common Road to Ruin, Addressed by Way of Warning to President Hayes

Henry Carey Baird (1877)

Auden #17, Christianity #7, Food #9, Love #19

It is no accident that the central rite of the Christian religion, its symbol for agape, love untainted by selfish desire or self-projection, should be the act of eating bread and drinking wine. For such a symbol, a sexual rite would never do. In the first place, since it presupposes two different sexes, it divides as well as unites; in the second, it is not intrinsically selfish enough. Though it is necessary to the survival of the race, the sexual act is not necessary to the survival of the individual so that, even at its crudest, it contains an element of giving. Eating, on the other hand is a pure act of taking. Only the absolutely necessary and absolutely self-regarding can stand as a symbol for its opposite, the absolutely voluntary and self-forgetful. From watching the way in which a person eats, one can learn a great deal about the way in which he loves himself and, consequently, about the way he will probably love or hate his neighbor. The behavior towards others of the gobbler will be different from that of the pecker, of the person who eats his titbit first from the person who leaves his to the last.


“The Kitchen of Life,” introduction to M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating (1963)

Art #13

L'art, c'est ce qui rend la vie plus intéressante que l'art.

Robert Filliou

History #8, Apocalypse #11

The Nineteenth Century and After

Though the great song return no more
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.


William Butler Yeats (1933)

Auden #16, Apocalypse #10

Our world will be a safer and healthier place when we can admit that every time we make an atomic bomb we corrupt the morals of a host of innocent neutrons below the age of consent.

(1965)

Word of the Day #23

Pathopatridalgia

Dead Presidents #33

Face mask of Abraham Lincoln, presumably copy of plaster life mask taken in 1860 by Leonard Wells Volk. (Photographed, Chicago, 1908)

Dead Presidents #32, The Animal Kingdom #9, Cinema #33

Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King
From the Edison films catalog:
A burlesque on Theodore Roosevelt hunting mountain lions in Colorado and taken from the New York Journal and Advertiser. The scene opens in a very picturesque wood. Teddy with his large teeth is seen running down the hill with his gun in hand, followed by his photographer and press agent. He reconnoitres around a large tree and finally discovers the mountain lion. He kneels on one knee and makes a careful shot. Immediately upon the discharge of his gun a huge black cat falls from the tree and Teddy whips out his bowie knife, leaps on the cat and stabs it several times, then poses while his photographer makes a picture and the press agent writes up the thrilling adventure. A side splitting burlesque. Length 75 feet. $11.25.

[Note: the signs held by the two men read “The Press Man” and “The Photographer"]

(February 1901)

Dead Presidents #31, Scopitone #31, War #8, America #34

ROOSEVELT: The Peace Victor: The President’s Song
Words and Music by Irvin J. Morgan (1905)


What’s the Greatest Ruler’s Name?
It is Roosevelt, We All Claim!
And He rules the Greatest Nation ‘neath the Sun:
Japs and Russians, All Hurrah!
For our Roosevelt, “Theodore”
Our Beloved President At Washington!

Chorus:
We will raise “Three Cheers,” Hurrah!
For our President, “Theodore”!
For the Japs, and the Russians who flew,
To the Land of the “Red White and Blue”!
We will raise “Three Cheers,” Hurrah!
For our President, “Theodore”!
All Hurrah! For Theodore”!
And the Land of the “Red White and Blue”!

The Mikado, and The Czar,
Are surprised at what we all are;
And they daily ask the question, Can it be;
That the great United States,
Is the Ruler of Our Fates
In these Lands so far across the deep blue sea.

CHORUS

Who was He, who said “Good, Good”?
Who was he, found “Chopping wood”?
Who was He, brought Peace, to Russia and Japan?
Who now has the World’s Renown?
And will wear the Victors Crown?
It is “Roosevelt”
Rise, and Cheer Him, Ev’ry Man!

CHORUS

Dead Presidents #30, Music #12

The President's Emancipation March
Composed for the piano by George E. Fawcett (c. 1862)

Love #18, Mathematics #4, D is for Dickinson #3

We shall find the Cube of the Rainbow.
Of that, there is no doubt.
But the Arc of a Lover's conjecture
Eludes the finding out.

(c. 1880)

Auden #15, Love #17

Half the literature, highbrow and popular, produced in the West during the past four hundred years has been based on the false assumption that what is an exceptional experience is or ought to be a universal one. Under its influence so many millions of persons have persuaded themselves they were "in love" when their experience could be fully and accurately described by the more brutal four-letter words, that one is sometimes tempted to doubt if the experience is ever genuine, even when, or especially when, its seems to have happened to oneself. However, it is impossible to read some of the documents, La Vita Nuova, for example, many of Shakespeare's sonnets or the Symposium and dismiss them as fakes.

(1963)

War #7, Medicine #1

Nurses advancing through a cloud of smoke in a gas mask drill of the U.S. Army Air Forces Technical Training Command. (c. 1942)

Annals of Advertising #4, The Animal Kingdom #8

Carrollton Chemical Co. advertisement (~early 1900s)

Dead Presidents #29, The Automobile #15

Presidents Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge sit in the back seat of a convertible automobile on street in Washington, D. C., during Hoover's inauguration. (March 4, 1929)

Archaeology of the Poster #6, The Automobile #14

Handle With Care, W.P.A. (1943)

Alcohol #9, Architecture #22, Manhattan #34

Three-Martini Lab?
Sample Room, Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe, architect, with Philip Johnson (1958)
Ezra Stoller, photograph

Faulkner #6, Architecture #21

And with the same success: as though his presence alone compelled that house to accept and retain human life; as though houses actually possess a sentience, a personality and character acquired not from people who breathe or have breathed in them so much as rather inherent in the wood and brick or begotten upon the wood and brick by the man or men who conceived and built them--in this one an incontrovertible affirmation for emptiness, desertion; an insurmountable resistance to occupancy save when sanctioned and protected by the ruthless and strong.

from Absalom! Absalom!

In Memoriam #8

Sir Edmund Hillary

(1919-2008)


Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau,
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe?
Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!

Charles Baudelaire, "Le Voyage" (conclusion)


we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,
to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell,
who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new.

trans. Robert Lowell

Manhattan #33, The Sea #6, Cinema #32

Fleet Steaming Up the North River

From the Edison films catalog: Shows the "Brooklyn," flying Schley's twin-starred blue flag. Every detail brought out with wonderful clearness. Excursion craft in the distance. Bow of the "Indiana" appears toward end of film. 150 feet. $22.50.

Camera, J. Stuart Blackton and/or Albert E. Smith (1898)

The Animal Kingdom #7

Invitation to Juno

Lucretius could not credit centaurs;
Such bicycle he deemed asynchronous.
"Man superannuates the horse;
Horse pulses will not gear with ours."

Johnson could see no bicycle would go;
"You bear yourself, and the machine as well."
Gennets for germans sprang from Othello,
And Ixion rides upon a single wheel.

Courage. Weren't strips of heart culture seen
Of late mating two periodicities?
Did not at one time even Darwin
Graft annual upon perennial trees?



Note: Dr. Johnson said it, somewhere in Boswell. Iago threatened Brabantio about gennets. Ixion rides on one wheel because he failed in an attempt at mixed marriage with Juno which would have produced demigods, two-wheeled because inheriting two life periods.


William Empson (from his Collected Poems)

Archaeology of Legislation #1

Act to Punish Seduction as a Crime

New York State (1848)

Archaeology of Comics #1

D.C. Comics projects an unimaginably distant future (1943)

Auden #14, Πολιτικά #1, America #33

As the issue between virtue first and liberty first becomes clear, so does the realization that the cost to any society that accepts the latter is extremely high, and to some may seem prohibitive. One can no longer make the task look easier than it is by pretending, as the liberals of the Enlightenment believed, that men are naturally good. No, it is just as true as it ever was that man is born in sin, that the majority are always, relatively, in the wrong, the minority sometimes, relatively, in the right (every one, of course, is free at any time to belong to either), and all, before God, absolutely in the wrong, that all of the people some of the time and some of the people most of the time will abuse their liberty and treat it as the license of the escaped slave. But if the principle is accepted, it means accepting this: it means accepting a State that, in comparison to its Roman rival, is dangerously weak (though realizing that, since people will never cease trying to interfere with the liberties of others in pursuing their own, the State can never wither away. Tyranny today, anarchy tomorrow is a Neo-Roman daydream); it means accepting a “Society,” in the collective inclusive sense, that is as neutral to values (liberty is not a value but the ground of value) as the “nature” of physics; it means accepting an educational system in which, in spite of the fact that authority is essential to the growth of the individual who is lost without it, the responsibility for recognizing authority is laid on the pupil; it means accepting the impossibility of any “official” or “public” art; and, for the individual, it means accepting the lot of the Wandering Jew, i.e. the loneliness and anxiety of having to choose himself, his faith, his vocation, his tastes. The Margin is a hard taskmaster; it says to the individual: “It’s no good your running to me and asking me to make you into someone. You must choose. I won’t try to prevent your choice, but I can’t and won’t help you make it. If you try to put your trust in me, in public opinion, you will become, not someone but no one, a neuter atom of the public.”

from his introduction to Henry James' The American Scene (1946)

America #32

NOTES OF AN INTERVIEW BETWEEN THE COLORED MINISTERS AND CHURCH OFFICERS AT SAVANNAH WITH THE SECRETARY OF WAR AND MAJOR-GEN. SHERMAN.

HEADQUARTERS OF MAJ.-GEN. SHERMAN,
CITY OF SAVANNAH, GA., Jan., 12, 1865—8 P.M.

On the evening of Thursday, the 12th day of January, 1865, the following persons of African descent met by appointment to hold an interview with Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War, and Major-Gen. Sherman, to have a conference upon matters relating to the freedmen of the State of Georgia [...]

Garrison Frazier (aged 67 years, born in Granville County, N.C. Slave until eight years ago, when he bought himself and wife, paying $1,000 in gold and silver. Is an ordained minister in the Baptist Church, but, his health failing, has now charge of no congregation. Has been in the ministry 35 years) being chosen by the persons present to express their common sentiments upon the matters of inquiry, makes answers to inquiries as follows:

First-- State what your understanding is in regard to the acts of Congress and President Lincoln's [Emancipation] proclamation, touching the condition of the colored people in the Rebel States.

Answer—So far as I understand President Lincoln's proclamation to the Rebellious States, it is, that if they would lay down their arms and submit to the laws of the United States before the first of January, 1863, all should be well; but if they did not, then all the slaves in the Rebel States should be free henceforth and forever. That is what I understood.

Second—State what you understand by Slavery and the freedom that was to be given by the President's proclamation.

Answer—Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the proclamation, is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, take care of ourselves and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom.

New-York Daily Tribune, "Negroes of Savannah," (February 13, 1865)

Organizations #7, Dead Presidents #28

Playground Association of America

Honorary President, President Theodore Roosevelt

(Founded 1906)

Anniverseries #7, Christianity #7

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek & he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child & thou a lamb.
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!

William Blake, "The Lamb," Songs of Innocence

Lines Taken Out of Context #10

Marley's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Dead Presidents #27, Cinema #31

Theodore Roosevelt calls on neighbors at Christmas in Oyster Bay, New York, then poses for a group portrait before the newsreel cameramen (1917)

History #7

Quid est enim aliud omnis historia quam Romana laus?

What else, then, is all history, if not the praise of Rome?


Francesco Petrarch, "Apologia contra cuiusdam anonymi Galli alumnias" in Opera omnia (Basel, 1554)

Book Titles Without Context #3

The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition

Ida B. Wells (later Wells-Barnett) (1893)

Cinema #30, Time #10

[Max Ophuls’s] elegant characters lack nothing and lose everything. There is no escape from the trap of time. Not even the deepest and sincerest love can deter the now from its rendezvous with the then, and no amount of self-sacrifice can prevent desire from becoming embalmed in memory. “Quelle heure est-il?” ask the characters in La Ronde, but it is always too late, and the moment has always passed.

This is the ultimate meaning of Ophulsian camera movement: time has no stop. Montage tends to suspend time in the limbo of abstract images, but the moving camera records inexorably the passage of time, moment by moment. As we follow the Ophulsian characters, step by step, up and down stairs, up and down streets, and round and round the ballroom, we realize their imprisonment in time. We know that they can never escape, but we know also that they will never lose their pose and grace for the sake of futile desperation. They will dance beautifully, they will walk purposively, they will love deeply, and they will die gallantly, and they will never whine or whimper or even discard their vanity. It will all end in a circus with Lola Montès selling her presence to the multitudes, redeeming all men both as a woman and as an artistic creation, expressing one long receding shot, the cumulative explosion of the romantic ego for the past two centuries.

Andrew Sarris, entry on Max Ophuls, in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968
last shot of Lola Montez (1955)

Order of the Universe #11

The first idea was not our own. Adam
In Eden was the father of Descartes
And Eve made air the mirror of herself,

Of her sons and of her daughters.They found themselves
In heaven as in a glass; a second earth;
And in the earth itself they found a green—

The inhabitants of a very varnished green.
But the first idea was not to shape the clouds
In imitation.The clouds preceded us.

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
The air is not a mirror but bare board,
Coulisse bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro

And comic color of the rose, in which
Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips
Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.


Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"

In Memoriam #7, Music #11, The Automobile #13, America #31

Ike Turner

(1931-2007)


Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, "Rocket 88" (1951)

War #6, Dead Presidents #26, The Outer Boroughs #6, America #30

The lot of a prisoner of war at all times and under all circumstances is one of constant and inevitable hardship. […] Separated from his family and friends, deprived by the exigency of capture of the companionship of tent-mates and comrades, surrounded not only by strangers but by enemies, a captive without rights which his captor was bound to respect, it is impossible to conceive of a more hopeless, distressing, and heartbreaking situation.

In relatively recent times the lot of the prisoner of war has been made the subject of amelioration, in cartels, treaties, and conventions, which define the rights of the captured and the duties of the captor. The personal safety of the prisoner of war is secured, his personal possessions and belongings are protected from capture and spoliation, and offenses against him are rigorously punished. The measures of restraint to which a captor may resort of the detention of prisoners cannot now take the character of punitive imprisonment

It must be a source of gratification to all of us to learn the provisions of the The Hague Convention with reference to the rights of prisoners of war as they are now understood by all the signatory powers to that convention, and to see that it is the duty of the capturing forces to make as ample provision for the prisoners of war as far their own men. […] This great memorial which we dedicate to-day, the conditions of things which it records, and their contrast with present conditions, properly called to mind the humane advance which has been made even in so cruel a thing as war.


President-Elect William Howard Taft speaking at the dedication of the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn (November 14, 1908)

History #6

The capacity to live in the past by memory also emancipates the individual from the tyranny of the present. He can choose, if he wants, to reverse a present trend of history in favor of some previous trend. He can, if he wishes, seek asylum from present tumults in a past period of history, or use the memory of past innocency to project a future of higher virtue.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History (1949)

Archaeology of the Poster #5, Cinema #29

El Dorado d. Howard Hawks (1966)
Poster art by Jerzy Flisak (1973)

Lines Taken Out of Context #9

A single grain of gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as obvious as an apple.

Edgar Allen Poe, "The Purloined Letter"

Anniverseries #6

Annals of Profanity #1, The Sporting Life #3

That such brutal language as “You cock-sucking son of a bitch!” “You prick-eating bastard!” “You cunt-lapping dog!” “Kiss my ass, you son of a bitch!” “A dog must have fucked your mother when she made you!” “I fucked your mother, your sister, your wife!” “I’ll make you suck my ass!” “You cock-sucker!” and many other revolting terms are used by a limited number of players to intimidate umpires and opposing players, and are promiscuously used upon the ball field, is vouched for by the almost unanimous assertion of those invited to speak, and are competent to speak from personal knowledge. Whether it be the language quoted above, or some other indecent and infamous invention of depravity, the League is pledged to remove it from the ball field, whether it necessitates the removal of the offender for a day or for all time. Any indecent or obscene word, sentence, or expression, unfit for print or the human ear, whether mentioned in these instructions or not, is contemplated under the law and within its intent and meaning, and will be dealt with without fear or favor when the fact is established by conclusive proof.


Special Instruction to [National League? baseball] Players (~1898)

In Memoriam #6, Aviation #11, Diptych #8, America #29

Evel Knievel

(1938-2007)


Evel Knievel crashes at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, Nevada (December 31, 1967)




still from Scorpio Rising
d. Kenneth Anger (1964)

Scopitone #30, Archaeology of the Music Video #6

Ernest Tubb, "Thanks a Lot" (1960s)

Lines Taken Out of Context #8

It is the celestial ennui of apartments

Wallace Stevens, from "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"

Scenes from a Life #16

obituary from the New York Times (September 13, 1930)

Scenes from a Life #15, Aviation #10, Aphorisms #6

Nous ne demandons pas à être éternels, mais à ne pas voir les actes et les choses tout à coup perdre leur sens. Le vide qui nous entoure se montre alors...

Antoine de St. Exupéry, Vol de Nuit (1931)

Pictured in his P-38, at a airfield in Corsica, shortly before his death (1944)

In Memoriam #5, America #28

Norman Mailer

(1923-2007)


Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.

"Superman Comes to the Supermarket," Esquire, November 1960

Photograph, Carl van Vechten (1948)

America #27

Stereoptic view of Lower Hudson Valley

Aviation #9

A young woman dressed in a swim suit, sash, tights, Shriner's hat, and high-heeled shoes steps into an airplane, Denver, Colorado. Photograph, Harry M. Rhoads.

America #26, WCW #5, History #5

I said, it is an extraordinary phenomenon that Americans have lost the sense, being made up as we are, that what we are has its origin in what the nation in the past has been; that there is a source in America for everything we think or do; that morals affect the food and food the bone, and that, in fine, we have no conception at all of what is meant by moral, since we recognize no ground our own—and that this rudeness rests all upon the unstudied character of our beginnings; and that if we will not pay heed to our own affairs, we are nothing but an unconscious porkyard and oilhole for those, more able, who will fasten themselves upon us. And that we have no defense, lacking intelligent investigation of the changes worked upon the early comers here, to the New World, the books, the records, no defense save brute isolation, prohibitions, walls, ships, fortresses—and all the asininities of ignorant fear that forbids us to protect a doubtful freedom by employing it. That unless everything that is, proclaim a ground on which it stand, it has no worth; and that what has been morally, aesthetically worth while in America has rested upon peculiar and discoverable ground. But they think they get it out of the air or the rivers, or from the Grand Banks or wherever it may be, instead of by word of mouth or from records contained for us in books—and that aesthetically, morally we are deformed unless we read.

William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1925)

Cinema #28, Foreign Lands #24

Hollywood Starland : Official Moviegraph of the Land of Stars, Where They Live, Where They Work and Where They Play (1937)

America #25, Architecture #20, The Automobile #12

Carpenter's Restaurant, Los Angeles, California, Wayne McAllister, architect? (photo: 1943)

Annals of Advertising #3

(c. 1880s)

Scopitone #29, Scenes from a Life #14

Elvis Presley sings the Beatles' "Yesterday" in rehearsal (1970)

Time #9

I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday's newspapers, in the jejeune advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.

Robert Smithson, "Of Passaic, New Jersey" (1967)

History #4

As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

Art #12, Beauty #5

One day the time will come when we shall be able to do without all the arts, as we know them now; beauty will have ripened into palpable reality. Humanity will not lose much by missing art.

Piet Mondrian

Manhattan #32, Love #16, Scopitone #28

Manhattan-I’m up a tree
The one I’ve most adored
Is bored
With me.
Manhattan, I’m awf’lly nice,
Nice people dine with me,
And even twice.
Yet the only one in the world I’m mad about
Talks of somebody else
And walks out.

With a million neon rainbows burning below me
And a million blazing taxis raising a roar
Here I sit while deep despair
Haunts my castle in the air
Down in the depths on the ninetieth floor.
While the crowds at El Morocco punish the parquet
And at “21” the couples clamor for more
I’m deserted and depressed
In my regal eagle nest
Down in the depths on the ninetieth floor.
When the only one you wanted wants another
What’s the use of swank and cash in the bank galore?
Why, even the janitor’s wife
Has a perfectly good love life
And here am I
Facing tomorrow
Alone with my sorrow
Down in the depths on the ninetieth floor.

Cole Porter (1936)

Lines Taken Out of Context #7

One angel no doubt can stand quite comfortably on the point of a pin, but when a whole battalion of angels attempt to occupy this identical space there is war in heaven.

Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age, from the chapter “Our Poets” (1915)

The Sporting Life #2, America #24

Red Stockings of Cincinnati baseball team (1869)

Scopitone #27

Dionne Warwick, The Animals, and a cast of (almost) thousands perform "Blowin' in the Wind" with two-dimensional Bob Dylan in the background.

War #5, Scenes from a Life #13, Catalogue of the Vanished #7

Ruins of Cloth Hall in Ypres, Belgium. Diary compiled by Ethel Anderson (1918-19)

Scopitone #26, America #23

Sam Cooke sings "Basin Street Blues" on the Mike Douglas Show (1964)

Scopitone #25, Scenes from a Life #12

Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan sing "I Still Miss Someone"
From Eat the Document (filmed 1966)

Archaeology of Madison Avenue #3, Age of Print #4, Triumph of the Machine #4, Mathematics #3

IBM advertisement (1960)

Order of the Universe #10

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'

Stan Brakhage, opening paragraph of Metaphors on Vision (1963)

Manhattan #31, Alcohol #8, The Automobile #11

Aft view of beer truck, Manhattan (1938)

Auden #13

The schoolmasters of literature frown on affectation as silly and probably unhealthy. They are wrong. Only stupid people are without affections and only dishonest ones think of themselves as rational. In literature, as in life, there can be no growth without them, for affectation, passionately adopted and loyally obeyed, is one of the chief forms of self-discipline by which the human sensibility can raise itself by the bootstraps.

Introduction, Poets of the English Language, Vol. II (1953)

History #3

The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.

James Bryce, introduction, The American Commonwealth (1888)