The First Bloomsday: See Dublin’s Literati Celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses in Drunken Fashion (1954)

in History, Literature | June 16th, 2017

Here’s a fascinating glimpse of the very first Bloomsday celebration, filmed in Dublin in 1954.

The footage shows the great Irish comedic writer Brian O’Nolan, better known by his pen name Flann O’Brien, appearing very drunk as he sets off with two other renowned post-war Irish writers, Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin, and a cousin of James Joyce, a dentist named Tom Joyce, on a pilgrimage to visit the sites in James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses.

The footage was taken by John Ryan, an artist, publisher and pub owner who organized the event. The idea was to retrace the steps of Leopold Bloom and other characters from the novel, but as Peter Costello and Peter van de Kamp explain in this humorous passage from their book, Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography, things began to go awry right from the start:

The date was 16 June, 1954, and though it was only mid-morning, Brian O’Nolan was already drunk.

This day was the fiftieth anniversary of Mr. Leopold Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin, which James Joyce had immortalised in Ulysses.

To mark this occasion a small group of Dublin literati had gathered at the Sandycove home of Michael Scott, a well-known architect, just below the Martello tower in which the opening scene of Joyce’s novel is set. They planned to travel round the city through the day, visiting in turn the scenes of the novel, ending at night in what had once been the brothel quarter of the city, the area which Joyce had called Nighttown.

Sadly, no-one expected O’Nolan to be sober. By reputation, if not by sight, everyone in Dublin knew Brian O’Nolan, otherwise Myles na Gopaleen, the writer of the Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times. A few knew that under the name of Flann O’Brien, he had written in his youth a now nearly forgotten novel, At Swim-Two-Birds. Seeing him about the city, many must have wondered how a man with such extreme drinking habits, even for the city of Dublin, could have sustained a career as a writer.

As was his custom, he had been drinking that morning in the pubs around the Cattle Market, where customers, supposedly about their lawful business, would be served from 7:30 in the morning. Now retired from the Civil Service, on grounds of “ill-health”, he was earning his living as a free-lance journalist, writing not only for the Irish Times, but for other papers and magazines under several pen-names. He needed to write for money as his pension was a tiny one. But this left little time for more creative work. In fact, O’Nolan no longer felt the urge to write other novels.

The rest of the party, that first Bloomsday, was made up of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, the young critic Anthony Cronin, a dentist named Tom Joyce, who as Joyce’s cousin represented the family interest, and John Ryan, the painter and businessman who owned and edited the literary magazine Envoy. The idea of the Bloomsday celebration had been Ryan’s, growing naturally out of a special Joyce issue of his magazine, for which O’Nolan had been guest editor.

Ryan had engaged two horse drawn cabs, of the old fashioned kind, which in Ulysses Mr. Bloom and his friends drive to poor Paddy Dignam’s funeral. The party were assigned roles from the novel. Cronin stood in for Stephen Dedalus, O’Nolan for his father, Simon Dedalus, John Ryan for the journalist Martin Cunningham, and A.J. Leventhal, the Registrar of Trinity College, being Jewish, was recruited to fill (unkown to himself according to John Ryan) the role of Leopold Bloom.

Kavanagh and O’Nolan began the day by deciding they must climb up to the Martello tower itself, which stood on a granite shoulder behind the house. As Cronin recalls, Kavanagh hoisted himself up the steep slope above O’Nolan, who snarled in anger and laid hold of his ankle. Kavanagh roared, and lashed out with his foot. Fearful that O’Nolan would be kicked in the face by the poet’s enormous farmer’s boot, the others hastened to rescue and restrain the rivals.

With some difficulty O’Nolan was stuffed into one of the cabs by Cronin and the others. Then they were off, along the seafront of Dublin Bay, and into the city.

In pubs along the way an enormous amount of alcohol was consumed, so much so that on Sandymount Strand they had to relieve themselves as Stephen Dedalus does in Ulysses. Tom Joyce and Cronin sang the sentimental songs of Tom Moore which Joyce had loved, such as Silent, O Moyle. They stopped in Irishtown to listen to the running of the Ascot Gold Cup on a radio in a betting shop, but eventually they arrived in Duke Street in the city centre, and the Bailey, which John Ryan then ran as a literary pub.

They went no further. Once there, another drink seemed more attractive than a long tour of Joycean slums, and the siren call of the long vanished pleasures of Nighttown.

Celebrants of the first Bloomsday pause for a photo in Sandymount, Dublin on the morning of June 16, 1954. From left are John Ryan, Anthony Cronin, Brian O’Nolan (a.k.a. Flann O’Brien), Patrick Kavanagh and Tom Joyce, cousin of James Joyce.

Note: This post originally appeared on our site in 2013–likely before many of you started to frequent our site. So it’s time to bring it back.

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Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses

Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

James Joyce, With His Eyesight Failing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

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How to Build Leonardo da Vinci’s Ingenious Self-Supporting Bridge: Renaissance Innovations You Can Still Enjoy Today

in History, Physics | June 16th, 2017

Leonardo da Vinci, the most accomplished example of the polymathic, artist-engineer “Renaissance man,” came up with an astonishing number of inventions great and small in the late 15th and early 16th century, from the helicopter to the musical viola organista, the tank to the automated bobbin winder. Even the devices he was born too late to invent, he improved: humans had crossed the humble bridge, for instance, for countless centuries, but then Leonardo created a new, self-supporting variety whose design, as followed by a kid and his dad in the video above, still impresses today.

“With a series of wooden poles and beams, ‘Stick-Boy’ shows his Dad how to build Leonardo da Vinci‘s self-supporting arch bridge, also known as the emergency bridge,” say the description by Rion Nakaya at The Kid Should See This. “No nails, screws, rope, glues, notches, or other fasteners are holding the bridge in place… just friction and gravity.”

Clearly it works, but how? According to a post at the blog ArchiScriptor on self-supporting structures, all such bridges, from Leonardo’s on down, really do rely on only those two forces. “Notches in the members make it easier to construct, but strictly speaking aren’t necessary as long as there is some friction. Gravity will do the rest.”

Leonardo, the post continues, “explored two forms of the structure – a bridge and a dome. His work was commissioned by the Borgia family, with the mandate to design light and strong structures which could be built and taken down quickly. This was to aid them in their constant struggle for power with the Medici family in Renaissance Italy.” The site of the Leonardo3 Museum adds, “we do not know whether this bridge was ever put to practical use, but it is not hard to believe that such a modular construction, extremely easy to transport and to assemble, must have met with great favor from the Renaissance lords who were always on the lookout for new technologies to put to military use.”

Leonardo himself called this “the bridge of safety,” and it counts as only one of the ingenious bridges he designed in his lifetime. For the Duke Sforza he also invented several others including a revolving bridge which, according to Leonardo da Vinci Inventions, “could be quickly packed up and transported for use by armies on the move to pass over bodies of water,” could “swing across a stream or moat and set down on the other side so that soldiers could pass with little trouble,” and “incorporated a rope-and-pulley system for both quick employment and easy transport.” All useful tools indeed for those who once sought military dominance in Italy, but even more beneficial as inspiration for the Renaissance boys and girls of the 21st century.

via The Kid Should See This

Leonardo da Vinci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Watch Leonardo da Vinci’s Musical Invention, the Viola Organista, Being Played for the Very First Time

The Anatomical Drawings of Renaissance Man, Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci’s Handwritten Resume (1482)

An Animated History Of Aviation: From da Vinci’s Sketches to Apollo 11

Did Leonardo da Vinci Paint a First Mona Lisa Before The Mona Lisa?

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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How Arabic Translators Helped Preserve Greek Philosophy … and the Classical Tradition

in History | June 15th, 2017

In the ancient world, the language of philosophy—and therefore of science and medicine—was primarily Greek. “Even after the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean and the demise of paganism, philosophy was strongly associated with Hellenic culture,” writes philosophy professor and History of Philosophy without any Gaps host Peter Adamson. “The leading thinkers of the Roman world, such as Cicero and Seneca, were steeped in Greek literature.” And in the eastern empire, “the Greek-speaking Byzantines could continue to read Plato and Aristotle in the original.”

Greek thinkers also had significant influence in Egypt. During the building of the Library of Alexandria, “scholars copied and stored books that were borrowed, bought, and even stolen from other places in the Mediterranean,” writes Aileen Das, Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of Michigan. “The librarians gathered texts circulating under the names of Plato (d. 348/347 BCE), Aristotle and Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BCE), and published them as collections.” The scroll above, part of an Aristotelian transcription of the Athenian constitution, was believed lost for hundreds of years until it was discovered in the 19th century in Egypt, in the original Greek. The text, writes the British Library, “has had a major impact in our knowledge of the development of Athenian democracy and the workings of the Athenian city-state in antiquity.”

Alexandria “rivalled Athens and Rome as the place to study philosophy and medicine in the Mediterranean,” and young men of means like the 6th century priest Sergius of Reshaina, doctor-in-chief in Northern Syria, traveled there to learn the tradition. Sergius “translated around 30 works of Galen [the Greek physician]” and other known and unknown philosophers and ancient scientists into Syriac. Later, as Syriac and Arabic came to dominate former Greek-speaking regions, the Greek texts became intense objects of focus for Islamic thinkers, and the caliphs spared no expense to have them translated and disseminated, often contracting with Christian and Jewish scholars to accomplish the task.

The transmission of Greek philosophy and medicine was an international phenomenon, which involved bilingual speakers from pagan, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish backgrounds. This movement spanned not only religious and linguistic but also geographical boundaries, for it occurred in cities as far apart as Baghdad in the East and Toledo in the West.

In Baghdad, especially, by the 10th century, “readers of Arabic,” writes Adamson, “had about the same degree of access to Aristotle that readers of English do today” thanks to a “well-funded translation movement that unfolded during the Abbasid caliphate, beginning in the second half of the eighth century.” The work done during the Abbasid period—from about 750 to 950—“generated a highly sophisticated scientific language and a massive amount of source material,” we learn in Harvard University Press’s The Classical Tradition. Such material “would feed scientific research for the following centuries, not only in the Islamic world but beyond it, in Greek and Latin Christendom and, within it, among the Jewish populations as well.”

Indeed this “Byzantine humanism,” as it’s called, “helped the classical tradition survive, at least to the large extent that it has.” As ancient texts and traditions disappeared in Europe during the so-called “Dark Ages,” Arabic and Syriac-speaking scholars and translators incorporated them into an Islamic philosophical tradition called falsafa. The motivations for fostering the study of Greek thought were complex. On the one hand, writes Adamson, the move was political; “the caliphs wanted to establish their own cultural hegemony,” in competition with Persians and Greek-speaking Byzantine Christians, “benighted as they were by the irrationalities of Christian theology.” On the other hand, “Muslim intellectuals also saw resources in the Greek texts for defending, and better understanding their own religion.”

One well-known figure from the period, al-Kindi, is thought to be the first philosopher to write in Arabic. He oversaw the translations of hundreds of texts by Christian scholars who read both Greek and Arabic, and he may also have added his own ideas to the works of Plotinus, for example, and other Greek thinkers. Like Thomas Aquinas a few hundred years later, al-Kindi attempted to “establish the identity of the first principle in Aristotle and Plotinus” as the theistic God. In this way, Islamic translations of Greek texts prepared the way for interpretations that “treat that principle as a Creator,” a central idea in Medieval scholastic philosophy and Catholic thought generally.

The translations by al-Kindi and his associates are grouped into what scholars call the “circle of al-Kindi,” which preserved and elaborated on Aristotle and the Neoplatonists. Thanks to al-Kindi’s “first set of translations,” notes the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “learned Muslims became acquainted with Plato’s Demiurge and immortal soul; with Aristotle’s search for science and knowledge of the causes of all the phenomena on earth and in the heavens,” and many more ancient Greek metaphysical doctrines. Later translators working under physician and scientist Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his son “made available in Syriac and/or Arabic other works by Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, some philosophical writings by Galen,” and other Greek thinkers and scientists.

This tradition of translation, philosophical debate, and scientific discovery in Islamic societies continued into the 10th and 11th centuries, when Averroes, the “Islamic scholar who gave us modern philosophy,” wrote his commentary on the works of Aristotle. “For several centuries,” writes the University of Colorado’s Robert Pasnau, “a series of brilliant philosophers and scientists made Baghdad the intellectual center of the medieval world,” preserving ancient Greek knowledge and wisdom that may otherwise have disappeared. When it seems in our study of history that the light of the ancient philosophy was extinguished in Western Europe, we need only look to North Africa and the Near East to see that tradition, with its humanistic exchange of ideas, flourishing for centuries in a world closely connected by trade and empire.

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Babylon, Rome, and the Islamic World

Introduction to Ancient Greek History: A Free Online Course from Yale

Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature & Philosophy

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

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See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Comparison of the Same Streets & Landmarks

in History | June 15th, 2017

The New Yorker has posted a very neat split-screen tour of the same streets in New York City, letting you see the Big Apple in the 1930s and today. Times Square, Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge–they’re all on display. What a difference 80 years make.

Below you can find other historical videos and photos of NYC … and London and Berlin too. Enjoy.

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1905 Video Shows New York City Subway Traveling From 14th St. to 42nd Street

Early Films of New York City

New York City: A Social History (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U.)

Berlin Street Scenes Beautifully Caught on Film (1900–1914)

1927 London Shown in Moving Color

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How Russian Artists Imagined in 1914 What Moscow Would Look Like in 2259

in History, Sci Fi | June 14th, 2017

In the days of popular retrofuturism—say, the first half of the twentieth century—people tended to imagine the world of tomorrow looking very much like the world of today, only with a lot more flying cars, monorails, and videophones. This is true whether those doing the imagining were titans of industry, marketing mavens, idealistic Soviets, or subjects of the Tsar, though we might think that people living under an ancient monarchical system might not expect much change. In some ways we might be right, but as we can see in the 1914 postcards here—printed as Russia entered World War I—the country did anticipate a modern, technological future, though one that still closely resembled its present.

Perhaps few but the most far-sighted of Russians predicted what the ailing empire would endure in the years to come—the disaster of the Great War, and the waves of Revolution and Civil War. Certainly, whoever painted these images foresaw no such catastrophic upheaval.

Although purporting to show us a view of Moscow in the 23rd century, they show the city very happily “still under monarchical rule,” writes A Journey Through Russian Culture, going about its daily life just as it did over three hundred years earlier, “with the addition of everything from subways to airborne public transportation, things probably seen as standard methods of transport for the future.”

Of course, there would be hot-rodded sleds on St. Petersburg Highway with headlights, fancy windshields, and what look like Christmas elves perched in them. Lubyanska Square, further up, would still host military parades of men on horseback, as children whizzed by on motorbikes and subway trains rumbled underneath. The Central Railway Station, above, might seem entirely unchanged, until one looks up, and sees elevated trams streaming out of the terminal like spider’s silk. Red Square, however, just below, would apparently host drag races, while people in trams and giant dirigibles looked on from above.

The images have a children’s book quality about them and the festive air of holiday cards. (If you read Russian, you can learn more about them here and here.) They were apparently rediscovered only recently when a chocolate company called Eyinem reprinted them on their packaging. Like so much retrofuturism, these seem—in their bustling, yet safe, cheerful orderliness—tailor-made for nostalgic trips through Petrovsky Park, rather than imaginative leaps into the great unknown. For that, we must turn to Russian Futurism, which, both before and after World War and the Revolution, imagined, helped bring about, but didn’t quite survive the massive technological and political disruption of the next two decades.

See more of these Tsarist-futurist postcards at the site Meet the Slavs.

How the Soviets Imagined in 1960 What the World Would Look in 2017: A Gallery of Retro-Futuristic Drawings

Download Russian Futurist Book Art (1910–1915): The Aesthetic Revolution Before the Political Revolution

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

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Japanese Kabuki Actors Captured in 18th-Century Woodblock Prints by the Mysterious & Masterful Artist Sharaku

in Art, History | June 14th, 2017

“Kabuki,” as a cultural reference, has traveled astonishingly far beyond the early seventeenth-century Japan in which the form of kabuki theatre originated. Even 21st-century Westerners are quick to use the word when describing anything elaborately performative or melodramatic: in the negative sense, it criticizes an excessive artificiality; in the positive one, it praises complex, nuance-laden mastery. Many scholars of kabuki will disagree about when, exactly, kabuki had its heyday, but none would doubt the immortality, for a kabuki actor of the late eighteenth century, granted by a Sharaku portrait.

Also known to us as Tōshūsai Sharaku (probably not his real name), Sharaku worked in the form of yakusha‑e woodblock prints, a kind of ukiyo-e focusing on actors, but only for a scant ten months in 1794 and 1795, and not always to a warm public reception.

“Renowned for creating visually bold prints that gave rare revealing glimpses into the world of kabuki,” says the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “he was not only able to capture the essential qualities of kabuki characters, but his prints also reveal, often with unflattering realism, the personalities of the actors who were famous for performing them.” Breaking somewhat from ukiyo‑e portraitist tradition, “Sharaku did not idealize his subjects or attempt to portray them realistically. Rather, he exaggerated facial features and strove for psychological realism.”

Nobody knows much about this mysterious artist’s background or his life after yakusha‑e. During it, he designed over 140 prints, and potentially many more, given the number that remain unverifiable as his work. Though he did occasional portraits of sumo wrestlers and warriors, the majority of his portraits depict actors, and seldom in an idealized fashion.

That sense of heightened reality also brought with it a certain vitality to that point unseen in yakusha‑e; art historian Muneshige Narazaki wrote that Sharaku could, within a single print of a kabuki actor or scene, depict “two or three levels of character revealed in the single moment of action forming the climax to a scene or performance.”

At the top of the post, we have three prints from the fourth and final period of Sharaku’s short career: Ichikawa Ebizō as Kudō Saemon Suketsune, Ichikawa Danjūrō VI as Soga no Gorō Tokimune, and Sawamura Sōjūrō III as Satsuma Gengobei. Below that, from top to bottom, appear Ōtani Oniji III in the Role of the Servant Edobei, Segawa Kikujurō III as Oshizu, Wife of Tanabe (one of the many female roles played without exception by male actors after the kabuki theatre attained its current form), Nakamura Nakazō II as the farmer Tsuchizō, actually Prince Koretaka, and Arashi Ryūzō I as Ishibe Kinkichi, which set an auction record for an ukiyo‑e print by selling for €389,000 at Piasa in 2009.

If you want to learn a little more about kabuki theatre itself, have a look at TED-Ed’s four-minute primer on its history. Though many of us may now regard kabuki as a high classical art form, it began as a “people’s” version of the aristocratic noh theatre, and an avant-garde one at that. Its very name appears to derive from the Japanese verb kabuku, which means “to lean” or “to be out of the ordinary.” Sharaku must have seen how incisively this theatre of the unusual, already long established by this day, could present the elements of real life; did he consider it his mission, during his woodblock-designing stint, to bring the elements of real life into its portraiture?

Download Hundreds of 19th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints by Masters of the Tradition

What Happens When a Japanese Woodblock Artist Depicts Life in London in 1866, Despite Never Having Set Foot There

Splendid Hand-Scroll Illustrations of The Tale of Genjii, The First Novel Ever Written (Circa 1120)

Behold the Masterpiece by Japan’s Last Great Woodblock Artist: View Online Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (1885)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Google Creates a Digital Archive of World Fashion: Features 30,000 Images, Covering 3,000 Years of Fashion History

in Archives, Art, Fashion, Google, History | June 13th, 2017

Both the fashion and art worlds foster the creation of rarified artifacts inaccessible to the majority of people, often one-of-a-kind pieces that exist in specially-designed spaces and flourish in cosmopolitan cities. Does this mean that fashion is an art form like, say, painting or photography? Doesn’t fashion’s ephemeral nature mark it as a very different activity? We might consider that we can ask many of the same questions of haute couture as we can of fine art. What are the social consequences of taking folk art forms, for example, out of their cultural context and placing them in gallery spaces? What is the effect of tapping street fashion as inspiration for the runway, turning it into objects of consumption for the wealthy?

Such questions should remind us that fashion and the arts are embedded in human cultural and economic history in some very similar ways. But they are also very different social practices. Much like trends in food (both fine dining and cheap consumables) fashion has long been implicated in the spread of markets and industries, labor exploitation, environmental degradation, and even microbes. As Jason Daley points out at Smithsonian, “The craze for silk in ancient Rome helped spawn the Silk Road, a fashion for feathered hats contributed to the first National Wildlife Refuges. Fashion has even been wrapped up in pandemics and infectious diseases.”

So how to tell the story of a human activity so deeply embedded in every facet of world history? Expansively. Google Arts & Culture has attempted to do so with its “We wear culture” project. Promising to tell “the stories behind what we wear,” the project, as you can see in the teaser video at the top, “travelled to over 40 countries, collaborating with more than 180 cultural institutions and their world-renowned historians and curators to bring their textile and fashion collections to life.” Covering 3,000 years of history, “We wear culture” uses video, historical images, short quotes and blurbs, and fashion photography to create a series of online gallery exhibits of, for example, “The Icons,” profiles of designers like Oscar de la Renta, Coco Chanel, and Issey Miyake.

Another exhibit “Fashion as Art” includes a feature on Florence’s Museo Salvatore Ferragamo, a gallery dedicated to the famous designer and containing 10,000 models of shoes he created or owned. Asking the question “is fashion art?”, the exhibit “analyses the forms of dialogue between these two worlds: reciprocal inspirations, overlaps and collaborations, from the experiences of the Pre-Raphaelites to those of Futurism, and from Surrealism to Radical Fashion.” It’s a wonder they don’t mention the Bauhaus school, many of whose resident artists radicalized fashion design, though their geometric oddities seem to have had little effect on Ferragamo.

As you might expect, the emphasis here is on high fashion, primarily. When it comes to telling the stories of how most people in the world have experienced fashion, Google adopts a very European, supply side, perspective, one in which “The impact of fashion,” as one exhibit is called, spans categories “from the economy and job creation, to helping empower communities.” Non-European clothing makers generally appear as anonymous folk artisans and craftspeople who serve the larger goal of providing materials and inspiration for the big names.

Cultural historians may lament the lack of critical or scholarly perspectives on popular culture, the distinct lack of other cultural points of view, and the intense focus on trends and personalities. But perhaps to do so is to miss the point of a project like this one—or of the fashion world as a whole. As with fine art, the stories of fashion are often all about trends and personalities, and about materials and market forces.

To capitalize on that fact, “We wear culture” has a number of interactive, 360 degree videos on its YouTube page, as well as short, advertising-like videos, like that above on ripped jeans, part of a series called “Trends Decoded.” Kate Lauterbach, the program manager at Google Arts & Culture, highlights the videos below on the Google blog (be aware, the interactive feature will not work in Safari).

Find out how Chanel’s black dress made it acceptable for women to wear black on any occasion (Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France — 1925)
Step on up—way up—to learn how Marilyn Monroe’s sparkling red high heels became an expression of empowerment, success and sexiness for women (Museo Salvatore Ferragamo from Florence, Italy — 1959)
See designer Vivienne Westwood’s unique take on the corset, one of the most controversial garments in history (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK — 1990)
Discover the Comme des Garçons sweater and skirt with which Rei Kawakubo brought the aesthetics and craftsmanship of Japanese design onto the global fashion stage (Kyoto Costume Institute, Kyoto, Japan — 1983)

Does the project yet deliver on its promise, to “tell the stories behind what we wear”? That all depends, I suppose, on who “we” are. It is a very valuable resource for students of high fashion, as well as “a pleasant way to lose an afternoon,” writes Marc Bain at Quartz, one that “may give you a new understanding of what’s hanging in your own closet.”

“We wear culture” features 30,000 fashion pieces and more than 450 exhibits. Start browsing here.

1930s Fashion Designers Predict How People Would Dress in the Year 2000

Punk Meets High Fashion in Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibition PUNK: Chaos to Couture

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

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Rare Footage Shows US and British Soldiers Getting Dosed with LSD in Government-Sponsored Tests (1958 + 1964)

in History, Psychology, Science | June 12th, 2017

We’re usually right to reserve judgement when it comes to conspiracy theories. But the reason they often sound plausible is a compelling one: What we do know about the secret activities of agencies like the CIA, FBI, KGB, NSA, etc. often points to a surreal, nefarious, extra-legal dimension full of plots Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick might have written. In such a dimension was born Project MK-ULTRA, the mind control program developed by the CIA in the early fifties and only officially stopped in 1973.

Most famous for introducing a young hospital orderly named Ken Kesey to LSD when he volunteered for an experiment—and thus acting as a primary cause of the Acid-fueled Haight-Ashbury movement to come—MK-ULTRA tested drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture as a means of manipulating interrogation subjects. At the same time as the CIA drugged willing and unwilling participants, Army intelligence conducted research into using LSD as a mind control agent.

Raffi Khatchadourian tells the story in The New Yorker of Dr. Van Murray Sim, founder of the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal program of clinical research on psychochemicals. To his colleagues, Sim “was like Dr. Strangelove; he was a leader; he was the ‘Mengele of Edgewood’… manipulative and vengeful, ethically shortsighted, incoherently rambling… and devoted to chemical-warfare research.” He volunteered himself as a test subject for VX, a lethal nerve agent, for Red Oil, a “highly potent synthetic version of marijuana,” and for other hallucinogens designed for “psychochemical warfare.”

Sim dosed himself several times with LSD and in 1957 proposed a series of “practical experiments” with the drug at Edgewood. “It was deemed important,” writes Khatchadodourian, “to conduct LSD tests on people who were provided no information about what the drug would do.” You can see film of one of those tests above, conducted in 1958 on Army volunteers who, the narrator tells us, “responded like well-trained soldiers to the request: immediately and without question.”

The soldiers are put through a series of drills. Then they are dosed and drilled again. There is much laughter among the squad, but one man succumbed to such severe depression that five minutes after they begin, the medical officers “end his participation.” After a few more minutes, “the men found it difficult to obey orders. And soon the results were chaos,” the narrator says. In reality, as we can see, the soldiers seemed happy and relaxed, not in a “chaotic” state, though their unwillingness to obey would certainly seem so to the brass.

British intelligence also tested LSD on its troops. In the film above from 1964, several armed British Marines are given a dose and sent out into the field exercises. The results are strikingly similar. Immediately after taking the field the drugged marines begin to giggle, laugh, and relax. But one man “is more severely affected than the others, losing all contact with reality, dropping his rifle, and becoming unable to take part in the operation. In fact, he has to be withdrawn from the exercise a few minutes later.” The remainder of the test subjects collapse in fits of hilarity.

“In the end,” writes Rich Remsberg at NPR, the U.S. Army decided that LSD “was too expensive” and “unstable once airborne,” though it did lead to something called Agent BZ, “which was weaponized but never used in combat.” But at the peak of its testing programs, Army intelligence, the CIA, and even Operation Paperclip—the secretive program that recruited former Nazi scientists into its ranks—showed an obsession with the drug, amassing huge supplies of it, and testing it on witting and unwitting subjects alike.

In one operation, called “Midnight Climax,” unsuspecting clients “at CIA brothels in New York and San Francisco were slipped LSD and then monitored through one-way mirrors to see how they reacted,” writes David Hambling at Wired. “Colleagues were also considered fair game for secret testing, to the point where a memo was issued instructing that the punch bowls at office Christmas parties were not to be spiked” with acid.

While the CIA pulled pranks—and inspired Kesey’s Merry Pranksters—the Army took its program overseas to Europe under the aegis of “Operation Special Purpose.” Even today, Khatchadourian writes, “the non-Americans who were tested have still not been identified.” Operation Special Purpose’s experiments “were disastrous, offering little or no useful intelligence, and risking untold psychological damage to the subjects.” The Cold Warriors in charge thought of the drug as a weapon, and threw ethics and scientific caution to the wind. In certain tests, interrogators intended “to cause maximum anxiety and fear.” They degraded and threatened subjects “as long as the drug was effective: eight hours, or possibly more.”

In recent years, LSD research has made a promising return, and has shown that, when used for purposes other than mind control, torture, and manipulation, the hallucinogenic compound might actually have beneficial effects on mental health and well-being. Today’s research builds on experiments conducted by psychiatrists at the same time as MK-ULTRA and Operation Special Purpose. “From the 1950s through the early 1970s,” writes the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), “psychiatrists, therapists, and researchers administered LSD to thousands of people for alcoholism, as well as for anxiety and depression” in terminal patients.

As in the tests in the films above, they found that—with notable exceptions—the drug made people happier, more relaxed, and less afraid of death. “When used by people without a family history or risk of psychological problems,” reported The Washington Post in a story last year on new research, “psychedelics can make us kinder, calmer and better at our jobs. They can help us solve problems more creatively and make us more open-minded and generous.” Perhaps part of the government conspiracy to use hallucinogenic drugs for ill involved suppressing all of the ways they could be used for good.

Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Animated

Ken Kesey Talks About the Meaning of the Acid Tests

Aldous Huxley’s Most Beautiful, LSD-Assisted Death: A Letter from His Widow

A Short Anti-LSD Horror Film Made by the Lockheed Corporation (1969)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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