Meet Viola Smith, the World’s Oldest Drummer: Her Career Started in the 1930s, and She Played Until She Was 107

in History, Music | October 21st, 2019

Update: Viola Smith sadly passed away this past week. You can read her obituary at The Guardian.

She may be the most famous jazz drummer you’ve never heard of.

Viola Smith played with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, performed for Harry Truman’s inauguration in 1949, and played in the Kit-Kat Band (see them below on I’ve Got a Secret), in the first Broadway run of Cabaret from 1966–70. These mark only a handful of her career highlights. She’s still thriving—and still playing—at the age of 106. While a fall has forced her to rely on a walker, she “looks like a seventy-five-year-old in terrific shape!” writes Dan Barrett at The Syncopated Times.

Born Viola Schmitz in Mount Calvary, Wisconsin in 1912, Smith started playing in the 1920s with her family band, the Schmitz Sisters Family Orchestra (later the Smith Sisters Orchestra). Consisting of Viola, seven of her sisters, and one of her two brothers, they played the vaudeville and movie theater circuit on weekends. Their father managed, directed, and booked the band. An appearance on America’s Got Talent, “the 1930s radio version,” notes Barrett, gave Viola and her sisters the confidence to form the Coquettes, who garnered a considerable amount of fame after their debut in 1938.

In 1942, Viola wrote an article for Down Beat magazine titled “Give Girl Musicians a Break!,” suggesting that bands who lost musicians to WWII should hire women. Later that year, when Mildred, Viola’s last remaining sister in the Coquettes, got married, Viola moved to New York, “where I always wanted to be,” she tells Barrett. She earned a summer scholarship to Julliard, Benny Goodman asked her to join his band (she turned him down), and she played with Ella Fitzgerald and many other greats. She recorded film music and played with the National Symphony Orchestra. She appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show five times.

Though often compared to Gene Krupa, whom she considers a “lovely person” and an influence, Smith had a very distinctive style all her own, characterized by a twelve-drum kit with two 16-inch toms mounted on either side of her head, as you can see in the clip at the top of the post, in a 1939 performance with the Coquettes. This was no mere gimmick. Smith had studied tympani at Julliard and imported classical training into her big band sound. (She claims drummer Louis Bellson’s use of two bass drums was due to her influence.)

Why isn’t Viola Smith better known? It may have something to do with patronizing coverage in the press, where she was described as “the girl Gene Krupa,” the “fastest girl drummer,” “the famous girl drummer” etc. Other female instrumentalists were similarly belittled as “girl” novelty acts, or ignored, even when they played with bandleaders like Benny Goodman, whose orchestra featured trumpet players Billie Rogers and Laurie Frink. (Smith herself frowns on women playing brass instruments, for some odd reason.) In her Down Beat article, Viola named a number of other top female players of the day who deserved more work and recognition.

She may forget things here and here, but Smith still has a steel-trap memory for a 106-year old who has lived such a rich life. Her interview with Barrett is full of detailed reminisces (she briefly dated Frank Sinatra, for example). She gives us a picture of a musician at the top of her game and in full command of her career during the golden age of big band swing. We can credit Smith’s lifetime as a professional musician with much of this confidence. Like all of her siblings she learned to play piano and read music from a young age, and she honed her skills as part of a hard-working family “pit band,” as she says. But she was also driven to succeed above all else, leaving behind the conventional life each of her sibling bandmates eventually chose.

Smith did it her way—reportedly turning down offers to play in Sinatra’s band and refusing bandleader Woody Herman in order keep playing with the Coquettes. She played for the radio show Hour of Charm until she was 63, and has played concerts recently in Costa Mesa, California, where she now lives, tended to by the staff of a quilting supply shop called Piecemakers. Smith talks easily about the sources of her musical longevity—her family band, education, and the tight-knit community of musicians who embraced her.

As for her physical vigor and stamina, this she chalks up to the rigor of playing the drums, and to relaxing with a drink or two on occasion—a lifetime of activity and moderation that has helped keep her sharp and healthy after all of her contemporaries have passed away. See Smith in interviews at 100, further up, and 102, just above, and read her recent interview at 106 at The Syncopated Times here.

via McGill Media

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Martin Luther King Jr. Explains the Importance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Festival (1964)

in History, Music | October 21st, 2019

Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of full inclusion for Black Americans still seems painfully unreal fifty years after his death. By most significant measures, the U.S. has regressed. De facto housing and school segregation are entrenched (and worsening since the 60s and 70s in many cities); voting rights erode one court ruling at a time; the racial wealth gap has widened significantly; and open displays of racist hate and violence grow more worrisome by the day.

Yet the movement was not only about winning political victories, though these were surely the concrete basis for its vision of liberation. It was also very much a cultural struggle. Black artists felt forced by circumstances to choose whether they would keep entertaining all-white audiences and pretending all was well. “There were no more sidelines,” writes Ashawnta Jackson at JSTOR Daily. This was certainly the case for that most American of art forms, jazz. “Jazz musicians, like any other American, had the duty to speak to the world around them, and to oppose the brutal conditions for Black Americans.”

Many of those musicians could not stay silent after the murder of Emmett Till, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, and a string of other highly publicized and horrific attacks. Jazz was changing. As Amiri Baraka wrote in a 1962 essay, “the musicians who played it were loudly outspoken about who they thought they were. ‘If you don’t like it, don’t listen’ was the attitude.” That attitude came to define post-Civil Rights Black American culture, a defiant turn away from appeasing white audiences and ignoring racism.

As jazz musicians embraced the movement, so the movement embraced jazz. While King himself is usually associated with the gospel singers he loved, he had a deep respect for jazz as a form that spoke of “some new hope or sense of triumph.” Jazz, wrote King in his opening address for the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival, “is triumphant music…. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument. It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians.”

Jazz not only gave order to chaotic, “complicated urban existence,” it also provided critical emotional support for the Movement.

Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.

King’s take on jazz paralleled his articulations of the movement’s goals—he always understood that the particular struggles of Black Americans had specific historical roots, and required specific political remedies. But ultimately, he believed that everyone should be treated with dignity and respect, and have access to the same opportunities and the same protections under the law.

Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.

Jazz music, said King, “is a stepping stone towards all of these.” Wrought “out of oppression,” it is music, he said, that “speaks for life,” even in the midst of what could seem like death and defeat. Read King’s full address at WCLK 91.9. And at the top of the post, hear the speech read by San Francisco Bay Area artists for a 2012 celebration on King’s birthday.

The 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival (poster above) was the first in the illustrious annual event. See many other stunning posters from the series here.

via JSTOR Daily

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The Politics & Philosophy of the Bauhaus Design Movement: A Short Introduction

in Art, Design, History, Politics | October 17th, 2019

This year marks the centennial of the Bauhaus, the German art-and-design school and movement whose influence now makes itself felt all over the world. The clean lines and clarity of function exhibited by Bauhaus buildings, imagery, and objects — the very definition of what we still describe as “modern” — appeal in a way that transcends not just time and space but culture and tradition, and that’s just as the school’s founder Walter Gropius intended. A forward-looking utopian internationalist, Gropius seized the moment in the Germany left ruined by the First World War to make his ideals clear in the Bauhaus Manifesto: “Together let us call for, devise, and create the construction of the future, comprising everything in one form,” he writes: “architecture, sculpture and painting.”

In about a dozen years, however, a group with very little time for the Bauhaus project would suddenly rise to prominence in Germany: the Nazi party. “Their right-wing ideology called for a return to traditional German values,” says reporter Michael Tapp in the Quartz video above, “and their messaging carried a typeface: Fraktur.” Put forth by the nazis as the “true” German font, Fraktur was “based on Gothic script that had been synonymous with the German national identity for 800 years.” On the other end of the ideological spectrum, the Bauhaus created “a radical new kind of typography,” which Museum of Modern Art curator Barry Bergdoll describes as “politically charged”: “The Germans are probably the only users of the Roman alphabet who had given typescript a nationalist sense. To refuse it and redesign the alphabet completely in the opposite direction is to free it of these national associations.”

The culture of the Bauhaus also provoked public discomfort: “Locals railed against the strange, androgynous students, their foreign masters, their surreal parties, and the house band that played jazz and Slavic folk music,” writes Darran Anderson at Citylab. “Newspapers and right-wing political parties cynically tapped into the opposition and fueled it, intensifying its anti-Semitism and emphasizing that the school was a cosmopolitan threat to supposed national purity.” Gropius, for his part, “worked tirelessly to keep the school alive,” preventing students from attending protests and gathering up leaflets printed by fellow Bauhaus instructor Oskar Schlemmer calling the school a “rallying point for all those who, with faith in the future and willingness to storm the heavens, wish to build the cathedral of socialism.” In their zeal to purge “degenerate art,” the Nazis closed the Bauhaus’ Dessau school in 1932 and its Berlin branch the following year.

Though some of his followers may have been firebrands, Gropius himself “was typically a moderating influence,” writes Anderson, “preferring to achieve his socially conscious progressivism through design rather than politics; creating housing for workers and safe, clean workplaces filled with light and air (like the Fagus Factory) rather than agitating for them.” He also openly declared the apolitical nature of the Bauhaus early on, but historians of the movement can still debate how apolitical it remained, during its lifetime as well as in its lasting effects. A 2009 MoMA exhibition even drew attention to the Bauhaus figures who worked with the Nazis, most notably the painter and architect Franz Ehrlich. But as Anderson puts it, “there are many Bauhaus tales,” and together “they show not a simple Bauhaus-versus-the-Nazis dichotomy but rather how, to varying degrees of bravery and caprice, individuals try to survive in the face of tyranny.”

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The Bauhaus Bookshelf: Download Original Bauhaus Books, Journals, Manifestos & Ads That Still Inspire Designers Worldwide

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The Nazi’s Philistine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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How Magazine Pages Were Created Before Computers: A Veteran of the London Review of Books Demonstrates the Meticulous, Manual Process

in Design, History, Magazines | October 16th, 2019

The London Review of Books is celebrating its 40th anniversary, but somehow the magazine has always felt older than that: not like the product of a stuffier age, but of a more textually and intellectually lavish one than the late 1970s. Pick up an early issue and you’ll see that, as much as it has evolved in the details, the basic project of the LRB remains the same: publishing essays of the highest quality on a variety of subjects literary, political, and otherwise, allowing their writers a length sufficient for proper engagement of both subject and reader, and — perhaps most admirably of all — refusing, in this age of internet media, to burden them with semi-relevant pictures and clickbait headlines.

“Much in those early numbers still looks fresh,” writes Susannah Clapp, who worked at the LRB during its first thirteen years. “But the apparatus and surroundings that produced them seem antique. Typewriters. Letters covered in blotches of Tipp-Ex, for which the office name was ‘eczema.’ No screens; hand-drawn maps for layout; tins of Cow Gum.” The cow gum was an essential tool of the trade for Bryony Dalefield, who since 1982 has worked “pretty near continuously” for the LRB as what’s called a “paste-up artist.” In the video above, she describes how her job — whose title remains “pleasingly still in the vocabulary in the digital age” — once involved “literally cutting up copy and pasting it onto a board so it could be sent to the printers and photographed for printing.”

Dalefield doesn’t just recount the process but performs it, summoning a presumably long-dormant but well-honed suite of skills to paste up a current page of the LRB just as she did it in the 80s. First she takes the text of an article, fresh from the print shop, and cuts it into columns with scissors. Then she spreads the Cow Gum, with its “strong petrol smell,” to fix the columns to the board, fearing all the while that she’ll stick them on out of order. Even in order, they usually require the addition or removal of words to fit just right on the page, and at the LRB, a publication to whose meticulous editing process each and every contributor can attest, another round of edits follows the first pasting. We then see why X‑ACTO knives are called that, since using one to replace individual words and phrases on paper demands no small degree of exactitude.

With the wrong bits cut out and the right ones pasted in and held down with Magic Tape, the completed page is ready to be sent back to the printer. Pasting-up, which Dalefield frames as a marrying of the work of editors and typographers, will seem astonishingly labor-intensive to most anyone under the age of 50, few of whom even know how magazines and newspapers put together their pages before the advent of desktop publishing. But the very word “desktop,” in the computer-interface sense, speaks to the metaphorical persistence of the old ways through what Dalefield calls the “falling out of trades” in the digital age. I myself have done a fair bit of “cutting,” “copying,” and “pasting” writing this very post — but I suppose I never did say, “Oh, that’s very sticky” while doing so.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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MIT Researchers 3D Print a Bridge Imagined by Leonardo da Vinci in 1502— and Prove That It Actually Works

in History, MIT, Technology | October 15th, 2019

Photo by Gretchen Ertl, via MIT News

Unfortunate though it may be for the dreamers of the world, we’re all judged not by what we imagine, but what we actually do. This goes double for those specifically tasked with creating things in the physical environment, from engineers and architects to inventors and artists. Leonardo da Vinci, the original “Renaissance man,” was an engineer, architect, inventor, artist, and more besides, and five centuries after his death we continue to admire him for not just the works of art and technology he realized during his lifetime, but also the ones that never made it off his drawing board (or out of his notebooks). And as we continue to discover, many of the latter weren’t just flights of fancy, but genuine innovations grounded in reality.

Take the bridge Leonardo proposed to Sultan Bayezid II, who in 1502 had “sent out the Renaissance equivalent of a government RFP (request for proposals), seeking a design for a bridge to connect Istanbul with its neighbor city Galata,” writes MIT News’ David L. Chandler. Writing to the sultan, Leonardo describes his design as “a masonry bridge as high as a building, and even tall ships will be able to sail under it.”

At the time, such bridges required the support of piers all along their spans, which prevented large ships from passing underneath. But Leonardo’s design would do the job with only “a single enormous arch.” About ten times longer than the typical bridge of the early 16th century, it took a page from the bridges of ancient Rome, designed as it was to “stand on its own under the force of gravity, without any fasteners or mortar to hold the stone together.”

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Alas, Leonardo, who had better luck with Italian patrons, didn’t win this particular commission. His bridge design must at least have impressed the sultan with its sheer ambition, but would it have held up? A team at MIT consisting of graduate Karly Bast, professor John Ochsendorf, and undergraduate Michelle Xie recently put it to the test, scrutinizing the material Leonardo left behind, replicating the geological conditions of the proposed site, and building a 1:500 scale model out of 126 3D-printed blocks. Not only could the model bear weight using only the strength of its own geometry, the design also came with other features, such as stabilizing abutments (which Chandler compares to the legs of “a standing subway rider widening her stance to balance in a swaying car”) to keep the bridge upright in that earthquake-prone area of modern-day Turkey.

That particular location didn’t get a bridge until 1845, when Valide Sultan ordered the construction of the first, wooden, Galata Bridge. It stood for 18 years until its replacement by another wooden bridge, part of an infrastructure-building push before Napoleon III’s visit to Istanbul. The third Galata Bridge, completed in 1875 from a design by a British engineering firm, floated on pontoons. The fourth was a German-designed floating bridge in use from 1912 until a fire damaged it in 1992. Only the fifth and current Galata Bridge, with its tram tracks above, its pedestrianized deck full of shops and market spaces below, and it drawbridge section in the middle, was built by a Turkish company. In all its iterations, the Galata Bridge has become one of Istanbul’s cultural reference points and major attractions as well — not that having been designed by Leonardo would have hurt its image any.

via MIT News/Popular Mechanics

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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26-Year-Old Steve Jobs Debates the Utopian & Dystopian Promise of the Computer (1981)

in History, Technology | October 8th, 2019

The deeper we get into the 21st century, the fewer aspects of our lives remain disconnected from the digital realm. The convenience of this arrangement is undeniable, but the increasing difficulty of getting through a day without hearing the latest version of the public argument about privacy and data security suggests an accompanying discomfort as well. Have our online lives stolen our privacy — or have we perhaps freely given it away? Some us now even look longingly backward to a time before not just social media but the internet as we know it, a time in which, we imagine, nobody had to worry about the large-scale harvesting and sale of personal information.

As the 1981 Nightline clip above reveals, these concerns went mainstream well before most Americans owned computers, much less went online with them. Even so, Ted Koppel could open the segment claiming that “as a society, we’ve become used to computer problems of one kind or another, just as we’ve become used to computers. We’re so used to them, in fact, that few of us stop to think of the extent to which they now play a role in our everyday lives, a role that shows every sign of growing even bigger.”

There follows footage of the contexts in which computers involved themselves in the lives of the average person in the early 80s: making a phone call, getting money from the ATM, buying groceries at the supermarket, booking an airline ticket. Nevertheless, actually owning a computer yourself could still get you interviewed on the news with the chyron “Home-Computer Owner” beneath your name. After we hear from one such enthusiast, the scene switches to the headquarters of the five-year-old Apple Computer, “the Big Apple in this land of high technology.”

A 26-year-old Steve Jobs appears to describe his company’s creation as “a 21st-century bicycle that amplifies a certain intellectual ability that man has,” one whose effects on society will “far outstrip even those that the petrochemical revolution has had.” But then comes the anti-computer counterpoint: “Some people feel threatened by them,” says reporter Ken Kashiwahara. “Some think they tend to dehumanize, and others fear they may eventually take over their jobs.” Over satellite links, Koppel then brings on Jobs and investigative journalist Daniel Burnham for a debate about the promise and peril of the computer.

“The government has the capacity, by using computers, to get all kinds of information on us that we’re really not even aware that they have,” Koppel asks Jobs, underscoring Burnham’s line of argument. “Isn’t that dangerous?” For Jobs, “the best protection against something like that is a very literate public, and in this case computer literate.” Predicting, correctly, that every household in the country would eventually have its own computer, he finds reassurance in the inevitably wide distribution of computing power and computer literacy across the public, meaning “that centralized intelligence will have the least effect on our lives without us knowing it.”

But Burnham nevertheless warns of “a tremendous danger that the public is not aware of enough at this moment.” He didn’t describe that danger in the forms of overgrown e‑commerce or social media giants — both of those concepts having yet to be realized in any form — or even ideologically opposed foreign countries, but the United States’ own Army and Census Bureau. What happens when they decide to use the data in their possession to “break the rules”? Computers are here to stay, it seems, but so are our inclinations as human beings, and one wonders how cleanly the two can ever be reconciled. As aphorist Aaron Haspel puts it, “We can have privacy or we can have convenience, and we choose convenience, every time.”

via Paleofuture

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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The First Music Streaming Service Was Invented in 1881: Discover the Théâtrophone

in History, Technology | October 2nd, 2019

Every living adult has witnessed enough technological advancement in their lifetime to marvel at just how much has changed, and digital streaming and telecommunications happen to be areas where the most revolutionary change seems to have taken place. We take for granted that the present resembles the past not at all, and that the future will look unimaginably different. So the narrative of linear progress tells us. But that story is never as triumphantly simple as it seems.

In one salient counterexample, we find that not only did livestreaming music and news exist in theory long before the internet, but it existed in actual practice—at the very dawn of recording technology, telephony, and general electrification. First developed in France in 1881 by inventor Clement Ader, who called his system the Théâtrophone, the device allowed users to experience “the transmission of music and other entertainment over a telephone line,” notes the site Bob’s Old Phones, “using very sensitive microphones of [Ader’s] own invention and his own receivers.”

The pre-radio technology was ahead of its time in many ways, as Michael Dervan explains at The Irish Times. The Théâtrophone “could transmit two-channel, multi-microphone relays of theatre and opera over phone lines for listening on headphones. The use of different signals for the two ears created a stereo effect.” Users subscribed to the service, and it proved popular enough to receive an entry in the 1889 edition of The Electrical Engineer reference guide, which defined it as “a telephone by which one can have soupçons of theatrical declamation for half a franc.”

In 1896 “the Belle Epoque pop artist Jules Cheret immortalized the theatrophone,” writes Tanya Basu at Mental Floss, “in a lithograph featuring a woman in a yellow dress, grinning as she presumably listened to an opera feed.” Victor Hugo got to try it out. “It’s very strange,” he wrote. “It starts with two ear muffs on the wall, and we hear the opera; we change earmuffs and hear the French Theatre, Coquelin. And we change again and hear the Opera Comique. The children and I were delighted.”

Though The Electrical Engineer also called it “the latest thing to catch [Parisians’] ears and their centimes,” the innovation had already by that time spread elsewhere in Europe. Inventor Tivador Puskas created a “streaming” system in Budapest called Telefon Hermondo (Telephone Herald), Bob’s Old Phones points out, “which broadcast news and stock market information over telephone lines.” Unlike Ader’s system, subscribers could “call in to the telephone switchboard and be connected to the broadcast of their choice. The system was quite successful and was widely reported overseas.”

The mechanism was, of course, quite different from digital streaming, and quite limited by our standards, but the basic delivery system was similar enough. A third such service worked a little differently. The Electrophone system, formed in London in 1884, combined its predecessors’ ideas: broadcasting both news and musical entertainment. Playback options were expanded, with both headphones and a speaker-like megaphone attachment.

Additionally, users had a microphone so that they could “talk to the Central Office and request different programs.” The addition of interactivity came at a premium. “The Electrophone service was expensive,” writes Dervan, “£5 a year at a time when that sum would have covered a couple months rent.” Additionally, “the experience was communal rather than solitary.” Subscribers would gather in groups to listen, and “some of the photographs” of these sessions resemble “images of addicts in an old-style opium den”—or of Victorians gathered at a séance.

The company later gave recuperating WWI servicemen access to the service, which heightened its profile. But these early livestreaming services—if we may so call them—were not commercially viable, and “radio killed the venture off in the 1920s” with its universal accessibility and appeal to advertisers and governments. This seeming evolutionary dead end might have been a distant ancestor of streaming live concerts and events, though no one could have foreseen it at the time. No one save science fiction writers.

Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward imagined a device very like the Théâtrophone in his vision of the year 2000. And in 1909, E.M. Forster drew on early streaming services and other early telecommunications advances for his visionary short story “The Machine Stops,” which extrapolated the more isolating tendencies of the technology to predict, as playwright Neil Duffield remarks, “the internet in the days before even radio was a mass medium.”

via Ted Gioia/The Irish Times

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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19th-Century Skeleton Alarm Clock Reminded People Daily of the Shortness of Life: An Introduction to the Memento Mori

in Art, History, Life | October 2nd, 2019

Victorian culture can seem grim and even ghoulish to us youth-obsessed, death-denying 21st century moderns. The tradition of death photography, for example, both fascinates and repels us, especially portraiture of deceased children. But the practice “became increasingly popular,” notes the BBC, as “Victorian nurseries were plagued by measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, rubella—all of which could be,” and too often were, “fatal.”

Adults did not fare much better when it came to the epidemic spread of killer diseases. Surrounded inescapably by death, Victorians coped by investing their world with totemic symbols, cultural artifacts known as memento mori, meaning “remember, you must die.” Tuberculosis, cholera, influenza… at any moment, one might take ill and waste away, and there would likely be little medical science could do about it.

Perhaps the best approach, then, was an acceptance of death while in the bloom of health, in order to not waste the moment and to learn to pay attention to what mattered while one could. Memento mori drawings, paintings, jewelry, photographs, and trinkets have populated European cultural history for centuries; death as an ever-present companion, not to be hidden away and feared but solemnly, respectfully given its due.

Or maybe not so respectfully, as the case may be. Some of these novelties, like the skeleton alarm clock at the top, look more like they belong at the bottom of a fish tank than a proper parlor mantle. “Presumably when the alarm went off,” writes Allison Meier at Hyperallergic, “the skeleton would shake its bones.” Wake up, life is short, you could die at any time. “Part of the collections of Science Museum, London, it’s believed to be of English origin and date between 1840 and 1900.”

The Tim Burton-esque tchotchke appeared in a 2014 British Library exhibit called Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, with many other such objects of varying degrees of artistry: “200 objects from a span of 250 years, all centered on the Gothic tradition in art, literature, music, fashion, and most recently film.” Memento mori artifacts offer visceral reminders that real, daily confrontations with disease and death were “at the base of much of Gothic literature and art.”

Where we now tend to read the Gothic as primarily reflective of social, cultural, and religious anxieties, the prevalence of memento mori in European homes both low and high (such as Mary Queen of Scots’ skull watch, in an 1896 illustration above) shows us just how much the gloomy strain of thinking that became the modern horror genre derives from a desire to confront mortality head on, so to speak, and finding that looking death in the face brings on ancient uncanny dread as much as healthy gallows humor and stoic, stiff-upper-lip reckoning with the ultimate fact of life.

via Lindsey Fitzharris

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Meet Viola Smith, the World’s Oldest Drummer: Her Career Started in the 1930s, and She Played Until She Was 107

Martin Luther King Jr. Explains the Importance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Festival (1964)

The Politics & Philosophy of the Bauhaus Design Movement: A Short Introduction

How Magazine Pages Were Created Before Computers: A Veteran of the London Review of Books Demonstrates the Meticulous, Manual Process

MIT Researchers 3D Print a Bridge Imagined by Leonardo da Vinci in 1502— and Prove That It Actually Works

26-Year-Old Steve Jobs Debates the Utopian & Dystopian Promise of the Computer (1981)

The First Music Streaming Service Was Invented in 1881: Discover the Théâtrophone

19th-Century Skeleton Alarm Clock Reminded People Daily of the Shortness of Life: An Introduction to the Memento Mori

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