You may have followed the story in the news lately–the song, “Happy Birthday to You,” has officially entered the public domain, thanks to a court battle fought by the documentary filmmaker Jennifer Nelson. The battle started years ago when Nelson was billed $1,500 to use “Happy Birthday to You” in a documentary–the price of licensing a song still under copyright. Wait, what? Flabbergasted that “the world’s most popular song,” which could be traced back to 1893, could still be under copyright, Nelson filed a class action suit against Warner/Chappell Music, the group claiming rights to “Happy Birthday.” And won.
In this new short documentary from The Guardian, Nelson tells the story of the song and her four-year struggle to give “Happy Birthday” back to the world. With a little luck, “This Land is Your Land,” will be next.
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Phillumeny — the practice of collecting matchboxes — strikes me as a fun and practical hobby. As a child, I was fascinated with the contents of a large glass vase my grandparents had dedicated to this pursuit. Their collection was an ersatz record of all the hotels and nightclubs they had apparently visited before transforming into a dowdy older couple who enjoyed rocking in matching Bicentennial themed chairs, monitoring their bird feeder.
As any serious phillumenist will tell you, one need not have a personal connection to the items one is collecting. Most matchbox enthusiasts are in it for the art, a microcosm of 20th century design. The urge to preserve these disposable items is understandable, given the amount of artistry that went into them. It was good business practice for bars and restaurants to give them to customers at no charge, even if they never planned to strike so much as a single match.
Or you could stay at home, trawling the Internet for some of the most glorious, and sought after examples of the form — those produced in Japan between the two World Wars. As author Steven Heller, co-chair of the School of Visual Arts’ MFA Design program, writes in Print magazine:
The designers were seriously influenced by imported European styles such as Victorian and Art Nouveau… (and later by Art Deco and the Bauhaus, introduced through Japanese graphic arts trade magazines, and incorporated into the design of matchbox labels during the late 1920s and ’30s). Western graphic mannerisms were harmoniously combined with traditional Japanese styles and geometries from the Meiji period (1868–1912), exemplified by both their simple and complex ornamental compositions. Since matches were a big export industry, and the Japanese dominated the markets in the United States, Australia, England, France, and even India, matchbox design exhibited a hybrid typography that wed Western and Japanese styles into an intricate mélange.
Find something that catches your eye? It shouldn’t cost more than a buck or two to acquire it, though Japanese clutter-control guru, Marie Kondo, would no doubt encourage you to adopt cartoonist Roz Chast’s approach to matchbook appreciation.
Earlier this spring, Chast shared her passion with readers of The New Yorker, collaging some of her favorites into an autobiographical comic wherein she revealed that she doesn’t collect the actual objects, just the digital images. Those familiar with Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant, Chast’s hilariously painful memoir about her difficult, aging parents’ “golden years,” will be unsurprised that she opted not to add to the unwelcome pile of “crap” that gets handed down to the next generation when a collector passes away.
As I recall, if you asked men in the 1990s to describe ideal the woman, a great many would have made references to Uma Thurman, who spent that decade playing high-profile roles in acclaimed movies like Pulp Fiction and Gattaca—as well as less-acclaimed movies like The Avengers and Batman & Robin (but hey, you can’t pick winners all the time). But animator, director, American Monty Python member and all-around visionary Terry Gilliam made use of the powerful appeal of Thurman’s presence even earlier, when—making The Adventures of Baron Munchausen—-he needed just the right young lady for a scene recreating Sandro Botticelli’s Renaissance painting The Birth of Venus.
“The casting director in L.A. said, ‘You’ve got to meet this girl,’ ” Gilliam remembers in the clip from this year’s BBC Arts documentary Botticelli’s Venus: The Making on an Iconat the top of the post. “There she was: statuesque, beautiful, intelligent—incredibly intelligent.” He compares the original canvas itself to a “widescreen cinema,” as well as, just as aptly, to a lower art form entirely: “The winds are blowing, her hair starts billowing out, the dressing girl is bringing in the robe — it’s a really funny painting, looking at it again, because she’s there, static, elegant, naked, sexy. The robe wouldn’t look so good if the winds weren’t blowing, nor would her hair look so beautiful. It’s like, this is a commercial for shampoo!”
As Monty Python fans all know, Gilliam had worked with The Birth of Venus before, using his signature cutout animation technique, which defined much of the look and feel of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to make Venus dance. “I like testing how much I like something, or how beautiful something is, by making fun of it,” he says to his BBC interviewer. “If it withstands my silliness, it’s really great art.” Further props to Botticelli come at the end of the clip, when she asks Gilliam if he thinks Venus represents “the ultimate male fantasy.” “Oh, why not?” he immediately replies. “You don’t do much better than that. I think he really cracked that one.”
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