CBGB’s Heyday: Watch The Ramones, The Dead Boys, Bad Brains, Talking Heads & Blondie Perform Live (1974–1982)

There are, I guess, still many things peo­ple can do these days to tap into the lega­cy of CBGB, but I wouldn’t rec­om­mend going near most of them. The mer­chan­dis­ing empire (do, how­ev­er, new par­ents, get your tot a CBGB bib and one­sie); the “thud­ding­ly banal” 2013 film ver­sion, which… the less said about the bet­ter; yes, and CBGB, the restau­rant, in the Newark Air­port Ter­mi­nal C—proceed at your own risk.

We must sad­ly also men­tion this past summer’s “Potemkin vil­lage from hell,” a pop-up “TRGT” shop for the grand open­ing of the East Village’s new Tar­get at 14th St. and Avenue A. This abomination—which sold CBGB-styled “TRGT” shirts and prof­fered Tar­get-brand­ed Band-Aids (get it? Bands) sent “Van­ish­ing New York” blog­ger Jere­mi­ah Moss into “a state of con­fu­sion and dys­pho­ria… to see the arti­facts of my own life, my cul­tur­al and spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing, my home, dis­played above the cash reg­is­ters in a Tar­get store.”

One can­not get too upset. The venue had been in a decline for a long time. The best of grass­roots Amer­i­can cul­ture all ends up in a Tar­get or Star­bucks even­tu­al­ly, gets green lit for a biopic and turned into an inter­ac­tive gallery. At least the CBGB build­ing was added to the Nation­al Reg­is­ter of His­toric Places in 2013. Maybe a boost for the sales of John Var­vatos who moved a store into the for­mer club in 2007, the very same year CBGB’s founder Hilly Kristal died of lung can­cer.

Ever-taste­ful New York Post announced the takeover with the head­line Hobo Goes Haute. “All of Man­hat­tan has lost its soul to mon­ey lords,” said Dead Boys gui­tarist Chee­tah Chrome. Twelve years lat­er, the lament seems under­stat­ed. But time moves on and so should we, the CBGB of the past was a moment in his­to­ry nev­er to be seen again, as fer­vid and fer­tile as late 19th cen­tu­ry Sym­bol­ism or the Beats—movements that just hap­pened to have very much influ­enced New York punk.

Like the life and work of Arthur Rim­baud or William S. Bur­roughs, the only way to com­mune with the leg­end of CBGB is through its pri­ma­ry sources. There is no short­age. Record­ings, pho­tographs, inter­views, and much excel­lent live footage of the bands that made the T‑shirt famous in the years of punk rock’s glo­ry: The Dead Boys and The Ramones in 1977, Bad Brains, invent­ing hard­core, in 1982, a very awk­ward Talk­ing Heads and con­fi­dent Blondie play­ing the Vel­vet Under­ground all the way back in 75….

Turn­ing cul­tur­al moments into mon­u­ments and mer­chan­dise is shal­low, of course, but it’s more than that—it’s impov­er­ish­ing. It makes us think we under­stand some­thing with­out ever hav­ing seen it. It’s not enough to know that it hap­pened, we should know how it hap­pened. How was the edgy elec­tri­fied dis­co stom­per “Psy­cho Killer” once a rick­ety, “tense and ner­vous” acoustic strum­mer? How did The Dead Boys’ Stiv Bators from Cleve­land more or less invent the moves front men and women in punk almost uni­ver­sal­ly adopt­ed? How did Wash­ing­ton DC’s Bad Brains break every unspo­ken rule of punk—with com­plex break­downs, tem­po shifts, and shred­ding solos—yet still con­quer every punk stage? How did the Ramones play entire live sets short­er than some of the sin­gle songs cer­tain oth­er bands played onstage at the time? How was it to wit­ness Blondie as a killer live cov­ers act? How was it to see The Ramones play “Judy is a Punk” in 1974?

For­get the grave­yard of CBGB kitsch out there. If you’re inter­est­ed in punk rock as a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non, you owe it to your­self to see as much of this his­toric footage as pos­si­ble, and to lis­ten to as many live record­ings of far-too-often unsung CBGB bands like Tele­vi­sion. And if you were there, con­do­lences. Maybe you owe it to the rest of us to tell how it real­ly was.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith Plays Songs by The Ramones, Rolling Stones, Lou Reed & More on CBGB’s Clos­ing Night (2006)

AC/DC Plays a Short Gig at CBGB in 1977: Hear Met­al Being Played on Punk’s Hal­lowed Grounds

1976 Film Blank Gen­er­a­tion Doc­u­ments CBGB Scene with Pat­ti Smith, The Ramones, Talk­ing Heads, Blondie & More

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

The Real Locations of Ukiyo‑e, Historic Japanese Woodblock Prints, Plotted on a Google Map

The undis­put­ed last great mas­ter of ukiyo‑e was Uta­gawa Hiroshige. He is best known for the many series he cre­at­ed of bucol­ic land­scapes, which offered col­lec­tors a chance to see parts of Japan they might nev­er reach. The Japan of his ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry work holds a spe­cial place in Japan­ese hearts–a final look at an iso­lat­ed and beau­ti­ful coun­try just before the open­ing up of the ports to the West and, with it, indus­tri­al­iza­tion.

Apart from Mount Fuji, the loca­tions that Hiroshige drew have long gone, but “Com­put­er sci­ence under­grad, mar­tial artist, ukiyo‑e lover” and British res­i­dent George–he goes by the Twit­ter han­dle @Cascadesssss–has plot­ted the loca­tion of Hiroshige’s prints on an inter­ac­tive Google map that has gone quick­ly viral.

The red cir­cles rep­re­sent the series “One Hun­dred Famous Views of Edo,” the blue cir­cles “The Fifty-Three Sta­tions of the Tokai­do” (one of five main routes in Edo Japan), and the green “Famous Views of the Six­ty-odd Provinces,” the most expan­sive series show­ing scenes all the way from the The Two-sword Rocks of Bo Bay to the north province of Dewa and Mount Gas­san. Each loca­tion opens to a sep­a­rate web page with loca­tion infor­ma­tion, includ­ing lat­i­tude-lon­gi­tude num­bers. (Pull up a chair map-lovers, you might be here a long time.)

“The Fifty-Three Sta­tions of the Tokai­do” was Hiroshige’s most pop­u­lar series and unlike the oth­er two depict­ed hor­i­zon­tal land­scapes. The artist sketched these in 1832 as he rode in a pro­ces­sion from Edo (now Tokyo) to Kyoto and set to work on the prints once he returned home. The 55 prints (two extra draw­ings of the start­ing and end­ing points of the jour­ney) sold like crazy, as they cost about the same as a bowl of soup for the com­mon per­son.

“Famous Views of the Six­ty-odd Provinces” is dif­fer­ent in that Hiroshige did not make trips to see all these beloved locations–instead he put his own spin on exist­ing draw­ings found in guide books and oth­er sources. The total series of 70 prints took four years to com­plete, from 1853 to 1856.

By the time the “Provinces” series was wind­ing down, Hiroshige start­ed work on his final series “One Hun­dred Famous Views of Edo,” which he worked on until his death. Again, though liv­ing in Edo, Hiroshige drew from the works of oth­ers from decades before. This is also the artist at his most adventurous–some land­scapes are obscured by posts and bridge rail­ings or even a carp stream­er. One fea­tures what is rumored to be Hiroshige’s favorite geisha. These prints would go on to influ­ence West­ern artists, espe­cial­ly Vin­cent van Gogh.

Hiroshige pro­duced more series over his life–he died aged 61–and here’s hop­ing Cas­cadesssss plots more on his map soon.

via Spoon and Tam­a­go

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

The Evo­lu­tion of The Great Wave off Kanaza­wa: See Four Ver­sions That Hoku­sai Paint­ed Over Near­ly 40 Years

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The Only Surviving Text Written in Arabic by an American Slave Has Been Digitized & Put Online: Read the Autobiography of Enslaved Islamic Scholar, Omar Ibn Said (1831)

Sev­er­al impor­tant pieces of pri­ma­ry doc­u­men­tary evi­dence have now become freely avail­able to schol­ars, stu­dents, and any­one inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can slav­ery, one an auto­bi­og­ra­phy writ­ten in Ara­bic by Omar Ibn Said, an enslaved Mus­lim man who was active­ly encour­aged to read and write by his North Car­oli­na own­ers. The Library of Con­gress announced this month that it had acquired the 1831 man­u­script in 2017 and has now uploaded dig­i­tal scans of Said’s Ara­bic orig­i­nal and sev­er­al oth­er doc­u­ments about him and in his hand.

A 1925 Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Said’s short mem­oir appeared in The Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Review as “the first sto­ry of an edu­cat­ed Mohammedan slave in Amer­i­ca.” Since 2013, it has been avail­able online at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Carolina’s Doc­u­ment­ing the Amer­i­can South project.

It is a con­fus­ing doc­u­ment, in Eng­lish at least: frag­ment­ed not only in its style but also in its shift­ing iden­ti­fi­ca­tions. This is hard­ly sur­pris­ing giv­en Said’s sto­ry, both a com­mon and very uncom­mon one.

Like mil­lions of Africans, Said had been cap­tured and enslaved, brought to Charleston, South Car­oli­na in 1807, escaped, then been cap­tured, jailed, and enslaved again in North Car­oli­na. What made him a minor­ly famous fig­ure in his own time—variously known as “Uncle More­au” (or just “Mor­ro” or “Moro”) and Prince Omeroh—as well as an impor­tant his­tor­i­cal fig­ure in ours, was that his is the only known sur­viv­ing account in Ara­bic. It is one writ­ten, more­over, by a man who had been a writer and Islam­ic schol­ar for 25 years before his enslave­ment in what is now Sene­gal.

Said “gives a brief sketch of his life in Africa,” in the 15-page auto­bi­og­ra­phy, the Library of Con­gress notes, “but enough to cre­ate a por­trait of a high­ly edu­cat­ed and well-to-do indi­vid­ual.” His learn­ing and lit­er­ary tal­ents so impressed his own­er James Owen, broth­er of North Car­oli­na gov­er­nor John Owen, that he was giv­en an Eng­lish Qu’ran, “in the hope that he might pick up the lan­guage,” writes Brig­it Katz at Smith­son­ian. He was also giv­en an Ara­bic Bible. “In 1821, Said was bap­tized.”

He became “an object of fas­ci­na­tion to white Amer­i­cans,” after con­vert­ing to Chris­tian­i­ty, “but he does not appear to have for­sak­en his Mus­lim reli­gion.” Said prais­es his own­er copi­ous­ly in the sketch of his life, with many expres­sions of Chris­t­ian piety. He also opens his text, which is addressed to a “Sheikh Hunter,” with sev­er­al vers­es quot­ed from the Qu’ran. “These might be omit­ted as not auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal,” the 1925 trans­la­tor wrote, “though it has been thought best to print the whole.”

To the con­trary, these vers­es, claims Mary-Jane Deeb—chief of the Library’s African and Mid­dle East­ern Division—tell us quite a lot about Said, per­haps as much as the main text itself. They can be seen as a sub­ver­sive means of com­mu­ni­cat­ing his con­tin­ued Islam­ic faith and his con­tin­ued resis­tance to his enslave­ment. The Surah he chose to quote “is extreme­ly impor­tant. It’s a fun­da­men­tal crit­i­cism of the right to own anoth­er human being.”

Said also inscribed in his Ara­bic Bible the phras­es “Praise be to Allah, or God” and “All good is from Allah.” The North Car­oli­na Depart­ment of Cul­tur­al Resources notes that “four­teen Ara­bic man­u­scripts in Umar’s hand are extant. Many of them include excerpts from the Qu’ran and ref­er­ences to Allah.” It’s pos­si­ble that Said’s con­ver­sion was gen­uine, and that he still expressed him­self in the idiom of his for­mer reli­gion and sub­ject of long study. It’s also quite like­ly that, for all the free­dom he received to study and write, he still had plen­ty of good rea­sons to fear open­ly resist­ing the iden­ti­ty forced upon him.

Said died in 1864, Katz notes, “one year before the U.S. legal­ly abol­ished slav­ery. He had been in Amer­i­ca for more than 50 years. Said was report­ed­ly treat­ed rel­a­tive­ly well in the Owen house­hold, but he died a slave,” hav­ing “much for­got­ten” as he writes in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy “my own, as well as the Ara­bic lan­guage,” hold­ing on to what he remem­bered of his lan­guage and his faith by writ­ing down what he recalled from mem­o­ry. View the dig­i­tized doc­u­ments from the Omar Ibn Said Col­lec­tion at the Library of Con­gress and learn much more about his life at UNC’s Doc­u­ment­ing the Amer­i­can South.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mas­sive New Data­base Will Final­ly Allow Us to Iden­ti­fy Enslaved Peo­ples and Their Descen­dants in the Amer­i­c­as

1.5 Mil­lion Slav­ery Era Doc­u­ments Will Be Dig­i­tized, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans to Learn About Their Lost Ances­tors

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visu­al­ized in Two Min­utes: 10 Mil­lion Lives, 20,000 Voy­ages, Over 315 Years

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

The Ancient Romans First Committed the Sartorial Crime of Wearing Socks with Sandals, Archaeological Evidence Suggests

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Of all sar­to­r­i­al crimes, none require quite so much brazen­ness — or sim­ple obliv­i­ous­ness — as the wear­ing of socks with san­dals. But unlike most wide­ly dis­dained fash­ions, which usu­al­ly tend to have enjoyed their hey­day two or three decades ago, the socks-and-san­dals com­bi­na­tion has deep his­tor­i­cal roots. And those roots, so 21st-cen­tu­ry researchers have found out, go much deep­er than most of us may have expect­ed. “Evi­dence from an archae­o­log­i­cal dig has found,” wrote Tele­graph sci­ence cor­re­spon­dent Richard Alleyne in 2012, “that legion­naires wore socks with san­dals” — ancient Roman legion­naires, that is. “Rust on a nail from a Roman san­dal found in new­ly dis­cov­ered ruins in North York­shire appears to con­tain fibres which could sug­gest that a sock-type gar­ment was being worn.”

“You don’t imag­ine Romans in socks,” Alleyne quot­ed the archae­ol­o­gist head­ing the cul­tur­al her­itage team on site as say­ing,” but I am sure they would have been pret­ty keen to get hold of some as soon as autumn came along.”

As with any new dis­cov­ery about life in the past, this changes the way enthu­si­asts of the peri­od have gone about re-cre­at­ing their favorite ele­ments of it: take, for instance, her­itage edu­ca­tor and crafter Sal­ly Point­er. “Point­er has been enam­ored with the ancient world since she was a kid,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Jes­si­ca Leigh Hes­ter, “when she cooked up plans for potions, devices, and craft projects — all with the goal of under­stand­ing how things came to be.”

Image by David Jack­son via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Look­ing to socks worn in ancient Egypt (see above), Point­er makes her own ver­sions of these “cheer­ful­ly striped” socks using a tech­nique called naal­bind­ing, “which is some­times con­sid­ered a pre­cur­sor to two-nee­dle knit­ting and involves loop­ing yarn on a sin­gle nee­dle,” and in this case mak­ing each sock­’s two toes sep­a­rate­ly and then join­ing them togeth­er. Should more evi­dence emerge about the tech­niques and styles of the socks Romans seem to have worn under their san­dals, Point­er and mak­ers like her will no doubt be the first to make use of them. But for now, we need only make one impor­tant revi­sion to the his­tor­i­cal record: “Britons may be famous for their lack of fash­ion sense and Ital­ians for their style,” as the sub-head­line of Alleyne’s piece puts it, “but it appears we may have inher­it­ed one of our biggest sar­to­r­i­al crimes from the Romans.”

via Tele­graph/Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Styl­ish 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

Ani­ma­tion Gives You a Glimpse of What Life Was Like for Teenagers in Ancient Rome

The Ancient Egyp­tians Wore Fash­ion­able Striped Socks, New Pio­neer­ing Imag­ing Tech­nol­o­gy Imag­ing Reveals

How Women Got Dressed in the 14th & 18th Cen­turies: Watch the Very Painstak­ing Process Get Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Recre­at­ed

Get­ting Dressed Dur­ing World War I: A Fas­ci­nat­ing Look at How Sol­diers, Nurs­ers & Oth­ers Dressed Dur­ing the Great War

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 Face­book.

Discover the Ingenious Typewriter That Prints Musical Notation: The Keaton Music Typewriter Patented in 1936

Noth­ing could seem more ordi­nary to any­one who has grown up with a musi­cian in the house, or tak­en music class­es them­selves, than sheaves of sheet music: quar­ter, half, and whole notes trip­ping through order­ly staffs in chords, arpeg­gios, and melodies. But the process of mak­ing those sheets of music is prob­a­bly far less famil­iar to most of us. Music print­ing his­to­ry, as the site Music Print­ing His­to­ry shows, par­al­lels book print­ing, but uses the tech­nolo­gies dif­fer­ent­ly, from wood­block to lith­o­g­ra­phy to pho­to­graph­ic repro­duc­tion to per­haps a rarely seen method—the music type­writer.

These inge­nious machines do exact­ly what it sounds like they do, in type­writer-like forms we’ll rec­og­nize and oth­er forms we will not. The first patent for such a device, filed in 1885 by Charles Spiro, shows an object resem­bling a sewing machine.

The next inven­tion, first patent­ed by F. Dogilbert in 1906, resem­bles a mechan­i­cal engrav­ing machine—and indeed, that’s more or less what it was. By con­trast, the 1946 Musicwriter, invent­ed by Cecil S. Effin­ger, looks just like an ear­ly IBM type­writer with a QWERTY key­board. The next ver­sion of the machine was, in fact, a word proces­sor made by IBM.

One inven­tion Music Print­ing His­to­ry does not men­tion was made by a woman, Miss Lil­lian Pavey, in 1961. In the British Pathé news­reel film above, you can see her type­writer in action as she tran­scribes music from a record in real time. In-between the ear­li­est music type­writ­ers, which were not mass-mar­ket­ed to con­sumers, and IBM’s slick, 1988 Musicwriter II, which was, there is the odd Keaton Music Type­writer, first patent­ed with 14 keys in 1936, then again in 1953 in a 33-key ver­sion.

See the Keaton’s clunky oper­a­tion at the top of the post. It looks a lit­tle like a seis­mo­graph or lie detec­tor machine with a semi­cir­cu­lar dou­ble ring of keys (in the 33-key design) in the cen­ter of a met­al car­riage. (See the orig­i­nal patent below.) Con­trary to the Pathé newsman’s claim that no one had suc­ceed­ed in mak­ing a work­ing music type­writer, the Keaton and oth­er mod­els to fol­low in the 40s and 50s sold, though not in large quan­ti­ties, and “made it eas­i­er for pub­lish­ers, edu­ca­tors, and oth­er musi­cians to pro­duce music copies in quan­ti­ty.” Typed sheet music could eas­i­ly be mass-repro­duced by pho­tog­ra­phy.

Nonethe­less, Music Print­ing His­to­ry notes, “com­posers… pre­ferred to write the music out by hand.” The type­writer was main­ly offered as a tool for mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion, not spon­ta­neous com­po­si­tion. Com­put­ers have changed things such that com­posers seem to have the same kinds of debates about hand­writ­ing vers­es dig­i­tal as writ­ers do. But where the type­writer is still a pow­er­ful sym­bol of lit­er­ary art—for some an instru­ment as dis­tinc­tive and wor­thy of study as the gui­tars of rock ‘n’ roll greats—the music type­writer is an odd­i­ty, a mechan­i­cal curios­i­ty no one asso­ciates with cre­ation.

Yet, as “the most vin­tage and won­der­ful­ly imprac­ti­cal thing ever,” as Clas­sic Fm dubs the device, unwieldy machines like the Keaton remain high on the list of cool, quirky inven­tions its most like­ly cus­tomers did­n’t real­ly seem to need.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Friedrich Nietzsche’s Curi­ous Type­writer, the “Malling-Hansen Writ­ing Ball”

The Endur­ing Ana­log Under­world of Gramer­cy Type­writer

Con­serve the Sound, an Online Muse­um Pre­serves the Sounds of Past Technologies–from Type­writ­ers, Elec­tric Shavers and Cas­sette Recorders, to Cam­eras & Clas­sic Nin­ten­do

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

How Zora Neale Hurston & Eleanor Roosevelt Helped Create the First Realistic African American Baby Doll (1951)

In the 1930s and 40s, child psy­chol­o­gists Ken­neth and Mamie Clark found that very young black chil­dren in the U.S. usu­al­ly chose dolls with lighter skin col­ors when giv­en a choice. The find­ings sug­gest­ed that the chil­dren had inter­nal­ized dom­i­nant prej­u­dices against them “by the time they reached nurs­ery school,” notes the Nation­al Muse­um of Play. “These stud­ies played an impor­tant role in the NAACP’s bat­tle in the 1950s to end seg­re­ga­tion in pub­lic schools.”

What often goes unre­marked in accounts of this research is that at the time “almost all of the African Amer­i­can dolls on the mar­ket were mod­eled after racist stereo­types,” as Emi­ly Tem­ple notes in an arti­cle on LitHub draw­ing on the work of his­to­ri­an Gor­don Pat­ter­son. “Those that weren’t” car­i­ca­tures “were just white dolls that had been paint­ed brown.” This had been the case for two cen­turies, as Col­lec­tors Week­ly explains. Black chil­dren had been inter­nal­iz­ing racism—learning to asso­ciate pos­i­tive attrib­ut­es with white dolls and neg­a­tive attrib­ut­es with black dolls.

But those chil­dren (and their par­ents) had also been reject­ing the racist car­i­ca­tures and forms of era­sure on offer. Tem­ple writes of how one white woman, Sara Lee Creech “noticed two black chil­dren play­ing with white dolls in a car out­side of a post office in Belle Glade, Flori­da.” She felt that they should have toys that rep­re­sent­ed their expe­ri­ence as well. Already a social jus­tice war­rior, as they say—“active in the women’s move­ments since the mid 1930s” and help­ing to found “an Inter­ra­cial Coun­cil in Belle Glade”—Creech decid­ed she would cre­ate a doll that “would rep­re­sent the beau­ty and diver­si­ty of black chil­dren.”

If this “sounds a lit­tle white savior‑y,” writes Tem­ple, “I’m with you,” but there’s much more to the sto­ry. Creech sub­mit­ted the idea to her friend Zora Neale Hurston, pio­neer­ing ethno­g­ra­ph­er of African Amer­i­can cul­ture and pre­mier nov­el­ist of the Harlem Renais­sance. Hurston “was enthu­si­as­tic about the project” and, in turn, pledged to “show pic­tures of the doll to the ‘well known and influ­en­tial mem­bers’ of the black com­mu­ni­ty with whom she had con­nec­tions.”

In 1950, Hurston wrote to Creech in praise of her inten­tion to “meet our long­ing for under­stand­ing of us as we real­ly are, and not as some would have us.” At the same time, Creech’s friend Maxe­da von Hesse brought Eleanor Roo­sevelt onto the project, who enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly sup­port­ed it as well, going so far as to host a tea with Mary Bethune, Ralph Bunche, and Jack­ie Robin­son, among oth­er influ­en­tial fig­ures, “to con­sult on the appro­pri­ate skin.”

The Ide­al Toy Com­pa­ny—found­ed by the cre­ators of the first mass-pro­duced Ted­dy Bear—took on the enter­prise of man­u­fac­tur­ing the doll, named Sara Lee, sell­ing the toy between 1951 and 1953. It was the first attempt to mass-mar­ket a real­is­tic African Amer­i­can baby doll. She first appeared in the 1951 Sears Roe­buck Christ­mas Cat­a­log. Major mag­a­zines like Esquire, Life, Time, Ebony, and Newsweek announced the doll’s arrival, but sales were even­tu­al­ly dis­ap­point­ing due to man­u­fac­tur­ing flaws.

The demand, how­ev­er, had always been there. Film­mak­er Saman­tha Knowles and doll col­lec­tors like Debra Britt and Deb­bie Behan Gar­rett describe their expe­ri­ences with the scarci­ty of black dolls on the mar­ket. Dur­ing her child­hood in the 1950s and 60s, Gar­rett remarks, “black dolls were just not read­i­ly avail­able, and those that were avail­able, my moth­er felt were not true rep­re­sen­ta­tions of black peo­ple. So all of my dolls were white.” (In his arti­cle, Pat­ter­son cites Toni Mor­rison’s The Bluest Eye as the clas­si­cal­ly trag­ic lit­er­ary treat­ment of the sit­u­a­tion.)

Even after the brief intro­duc­tion of the Sara Lee doll, Gar­ret­t’s expe­ri­ence con­tin­ued to be that of most back chil­dren. As the Muse­um of Play notes, it wouldn’t be until 1968 that major com­pa­nies would again mass-mar­ket black dolls, start­ing with Barbie’s friend Christie. That year also saw the release of “Baby Nan­cy,writes Gar­rett, made by new­ly-found­ed black-owned doll com­pa­ny Shin­dana toys, which became “the nation’s largest man­u­fac­tur­er of black dolls and games.”

Read more at LitHub about how Zora Neale Hurston, Eleanor Roo­sevelt, and an unknown activist in the late 1940s and ear­ly 50s first opened the door to a more inclu­sive toy mar­ket that treat­ed its cus­tomers more equal­ly. Using com­mer­cial means to effect social change may remain a debat­able tac­tic, but there’s no ques­tion that pos­i­tive cul­tur­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion mat­ters for children’s devel­op­ment. Inten­tion­al or oth­er­wise, exclu­sion and stereo­typ­ing cause real harm. As Deb­bie Gar­rett puts it, “if black chil­dren are force-fed that white is bet­ter, or if that’s all that they are exposed to, then they might start to think, ‘What is wrong with me?’”

via LitHub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Zora Neal Hurston Wrote a Book About Cud­jo Lewis, the Last Sur­vivor of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and It’s Final­ly Get­ting Pub­lished 87 Years Lat­er

Down­load Dig­i­tized Copies of The Negro Trav­el­ers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civ­il Rights Guide to Trav­el­ing Safe­ly in the U.S. (1936–66)

Actors from The Wire Star in a Short Film Adap­ta­tion of Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Gild­ed Six-Bits” (2001)

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

To Help Digitize and Preserve the Sound of Stradivarius Violins, a City in Italy Has Gone Silent

Image by Mark Ordonez, via Flickr Com­mons

We all have respect, even awe, for the name Stradi­var­ius, even those of us who have nev­er held a vio­lin, let alone played one. The vio­lins — as well as vio­las, cel­los, and oth­er string instru­ments, includ­ing gui­tars — made by mem­bers of the Stradi­vari fam­i­ly 300 years ago have become sym­bols of pure son­ic qual­i­ty, still not quite replic­a­ble with even 21st-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy, with rar­i­ty and prices to match. But to tru­ly under­stand the pre­cious­ness of the Stradi­var­ius, look not to the auc­tion house but to the north­ern Ital­ian city of Cre­mona, home of the Museo del Vio­li­no and its col­lec­tion of some of the best-pre­served exam­ples of the 650 sur­viv­ing Stradi­var­ius instru­ments in the world.

“Cre­mona is home to the work­shops of some of the world’s finest instru­ment mak­ers, includ­ing Anto­nio Stradi­vari, who in the 17th and 18th cen­turies pro­duced some of the finest vio­lins and cel­los ever made,” writes The New York Times’ Max Par­adiso.

“The city is get­ting behind an ambi­tious project to dig­i­tal­ly record the sounds of the Stradi­var­ius instru­ments for pos­ter­i­ty, as well as oth­ers by Amati and Guarneri del Gesù, two oth­er famous Cre­mona crafts­men. And that means being qui­et.” It’s all to help the ambi­tious record­ing project now cre­at­ing the Stradi­var­ius Sound Bank, “a data­base stor­ing all the pos­si­ble tones that four instru­ments select­ed from the Museo del Violino’s col­lec­tion can pro­duce.”

This requires great efforts on the part of the engi­neers and the per­form­ers, the lat­ter of whom have to play hun­dreds of scales and arpeg­gios (exam­ples of which you can hear embed­ded in The New York Times arti­cle) on these stag­ger­ing­ly valu­able instru­ments. But the peo­ple of Cre­mona have to coop­er­ate, too: in the area around the Museo del Vio­li­no’s audi­to­ri­um where the Stradi­var­ius Sound Bank is record­ing, “the sound of a car engine, or a woman walk­ing in high heels, pro­duces vibra­tions that run under­ground and rever­ber­ate in the micro­phones, mak­ing the record­ing worth­less.” And so Cre­mon­a’s may­or, also the pres­i­dent of the Stradi­var­ius Foun­da­tion, “allowed the streets around the muse­um to be closed for five weeks, and appealed to peo­ple in the city to keep it down.”

Few of us alive today have heard the sound of a Stradi­var­ius in per­son, but that num­ber will shrink fur­ther still in future gen­er­a­tions. It’s to do with the very nature of these cen­turies-old instru­ments which, no mat­ter what kind of efforts go toward mak­ing them playable, still seem to have a finite lifes­pan. “We pre­serve and restore them,” Par­adiso quotes Museo del Vio­li­no cura­tor Faus­to Cac­cia­tori as say­ing, “but after they reach a cer­tain age, they become too frag­ile to be played and they ‘go to sleep,’ so to speak.” The day will pre­sum­ably come when the last Stradi­var­ius goes to sleep, but by that time the sounds they made will still be wide awake in their dig­i­tized sec­ond life. And we can be cer­tain, at least, that future gen­er­a­tions will think of a musi­cal use for them that we can no more imag­ine now than Anto­nio Stradi­vari could have in his day.

via The New York Times

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Stradi­var­ius Vio­lins Are Worth Mil­lions

What Makes the Stradi­var­ius Spe­cial? It Was Designed to Sound Like a Female Sopra­no Voice, With Notes Sound­ing Like Vow­els, Says Researcher

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Watch Price­less 17-Cen­tu­ry Stradi­var­ius and Amati Vio­lins Get Tak­en for a Test Dri­ve by Pro­fes­sion­al Vio­lin­ists

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

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 Face­book.

Vintage Geological Maps Get Turned Into 3D Topographical Wonders

What good is an old-fash­ioned map in the age of apps?

One need not be a moun­taineer, geo­sci­en­tist, or civ­il engi­neer to get the topo­graph­i­cal lay of the land with a speed and accu­ra­cy that would have blown Lewis and Clark’s minds’ right through the top of the lynx and otter top­pers they took to wear­ing after their stan­dard issue army lids wore out.

There’s still some­thing to be said for the old ways, though.

Graph­ic design­er Scott Rein­hard has all the lat­est tech­no­log­i­cal advances at his dis­pos­al, but it took com­bin­ing them with hun­dred-year-old maps for him to get a tru­ly 3‑D appre­ci­a­tion for loca­tions he has vis­it­ed around the Unit­ed States, as well as his child­hood home.

A son of Indi­ana, Rein­hard told Colossal’s Kate Sierzputows­ki that he found some Grand Teton-type excite­ment in the noto­ri­ous­ly flat Hoosier State once he start­ed mar­ry­ing offi­cial nation­al geospa­tial data to vin­tage map designs:

 When I began ren­der­ing the ele­va­tion data for the state, the sto­ry of the land emerged. The glac­i­ers that reced­ed across the north­ern half of the state after the last ice age scraped and gouged and shaped the land in a way that is spec­tac­u­lar­ly clear…I felt empow­ered by the abil­i­ty to col­lect and process the vast amounts of infor­ma­tion freely avail­able, and cre­ate beau­ti­ful images.

(The gov­ern­ment shut-down has not dam­aged the accu­ra­cy of Reinhard’s maps, but the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Survey’s web­site does warn the pub­lic that the effects of any earth­quakes or oth­er force majeure occur­ring dur­ing this black-out peri­od will not imme­di­ate­ly be reflect­ed in their topos.)

(Nor are they able to respond to any inquiries, which puts a damper on hol­i­day week­end plans for mak­ing salt dough maps, anoth­er Hoosier state fave, at least in 1974…)

As writer Jason Kot­tke notes, the shad­ows the moun­tains cast on the mar­gins of Reinhard’s maps are a par­tic­u­lar­ly effec­tive opti­cal trick.

You can see more of Reinhard’s dig­i­tal­ly enhanced maps from the late 19th and ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry, and order prints in his online shop.

via Kot­tke/Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

View and Down­load Near­ly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS)

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City in Feb­ru­ary as host of  The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

« Go BackMore in this category... »
Quantcast