In May we featured color footage of a bombed-out Berlin a month after Germany’s defeat in the Second World War. Today we have footage of Tokyo, the other Axis power’s capital city, shot in that aftermath era, albeit in black-and-white — but at such a high level of clarity and with such smoothness that it feels as if it could have come from a historical movie made today. These clips, assembled into a sort of music video by the record producer and DJ Boogie Belgique, take us for a ride down a shopping street in the Shinbashi district, past market stalls in Shibuya, alongside the river, and even into areas meant exclusively for the occupying American forces.
Given that, and given the obviously high technology used to capture the footage itself, the occupying American forces more than likely shot this film themselves. But when did they do it? Clearly, Tokyo has had time to build itself back up after the immense destruction of the war, but how much time exactly? The Japan-watchers at Rocket News 24 have put their heads together to answer that question. “Japan was occupied from 1945 to 1952, so it was most likely around that time,” writes that site’s Scott Wilson.
He goes on to enumerate the visual clues that help pin down the year, including one poster for “Hatsu Imai, the first woman elected to the Japanese House of Representatives in 1946” and another for Miracle on 34th Street, originally released in November 1948. The consensus, in any case, seems to call this the Tokyo of the late 1940s, the city that Yasujirō Ozu, one of Japan’s most beloved auteurs, used as a setting in films like The Record of a Tenement Gentleman, A Hen in the Wind, and Late Spring.
But Ozu never included any visible traces of the American occupation, much less the clear presence we see in this documentary clip, in large part due to the demands of the American censors. They frowned on any direct reference to the United States, to the point that they almost cut out of Late Spring the admiring reference to Gary Cooper, to whom the main character’s matchmaking aunt compares the suitor she’s chosen for her. That main character, named Noriko, went on to appear in Ozu’s Early Summer in 1951 and Tokyo Story in 1953 — not as the exact same person each time, but always played by Setsuko Hara, rest her sweet soul, as the archetypal young-ish woman in postwar Tokyo. How many real-life Norikos of Shinbashi or Shibuya, I wonder, turned their heads to watch the American camera crew pass by?
Last Tuesday, December 1st, marked the 60th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ refusal to relinquish her seat at the front of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, and as some people pointed out, the story many of us were told as children about Parks’ act of civil disobedience was fabricated. Parks was not a humble, elderly seamstress worn out from a long day of work, a myth author Herbert Kohl summarizes as “Rosa Parks the Tired.” She was a well-connected activist and NAACP leader who had already initiated actions to integrate local libraries. Of her grossly oversimplified biography, Parks remarked in her memoirs, “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Nor was Parks the first to brave arrest for refusing to give up a seat at the front of the bus. That same year, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give in, and seven months later, so did 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith. Neither of their arrests, however, had the power to spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the action that brought national attention to the civil rights movement and to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership role. King would later recall that “Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned to her by history” because “her character was impeccable and her dedication deep-rooted.” King’s repeated emphasis on “character” throughout his direction of the boycott and beyond often seems an awful lot like what is today disparaged, with good reason, as “respectability politics”—the notion that only those who conform to conservative, middle-class norms of dress and behavior deserve to be treated with dignity and to have their civil rights respected.
But this was not necessarily his point. His embrace of nonviolent resistance was in part a strategic means of presenting the Jim Crow power structure with an implacable united front that could not be moved to react in ways that might seem to justify violence in the eyes of a largely unsympathetic public—to make it clear beyond any doubt who was the aggressor. And the violence and repression directed at the boycotters was significant. They were attacked while walking to work; King’s and civil rights leader E.D. Nixon’s houses were both firebombed; and King, Parks, and 87 others were indicted for their participation in the boycott.
Nor did the boycott’s success in 1956 put an end to the attacks. As a site commemorating this history summarizes, “After the boycott came to a close, snipers shot into buses in black communities, at one point hitting a young black woman, Rosa Jordan, in the legs.” And on one single night in 1957, “four black churches and two homes were bombed.” These acts were on the extreme end of a daily series of aggressive confrontations and humiliations black riders faced as they boarded the newly-integrated Montgomery buses. To help those riders navigate this environment, King prepared the list of guidelines above on the week before the buses integrated. You can read a full transcript of the list below, thanks to Lists of Note, who include it in their recent book-length collection.
King makes his agenda clear in the introductory paragraph: “If there is violence in word or deed it must not be our people who commit it.” Some of these directives encourage great passivity in the face of often extreme hostility. It is very difficult for me to imagine responding in such ways to insults or physical attacks. And yet, the boycotters had already daily, and calmly, faced death and severe injury. As white Lutheran minister Robert Graetz—whose home was also bombed—remembered later, “Dr. King used to talk about the reality that some of us were going to die and that if any of us were afraid to die we really shouldn’t be there.”
INTEGRATED BUS SUGGESTIONS
This is a historic week because segregation on buses has now been declared unconstitutional. Within a few days the Supreme Court Mandate will reach Montgomery and you will be re-boarding integrated buses. This places upon us all a tremendous responsibility of maintaining, in face of what could be some unpleasantness, a calm and loving dignity befitting good citizens and members of our Race. If there is violence in word or deed it must not be our people who commit it.
For your help and convenience the following suggestions are made. Will you read, study and memorize them so that our non-violent determination may not be endangered. First, some general suggestions:
1 Not all white people are opposed to integrated buses. Accept goodwill on the part of many.
2 The whole bus is now for the use of all Take a vacant seat.
3 Pray for guidance and commit yourself to complete non-violence in word and action as you enter the bus.
4 Demonstrate the calm dignity of our Montgomery people in your actions.
5 In all things observe ordinary rules of courtesy and good behavior.
6 Remember that this is not a victory for Negroes alone, but for all Montgomery and the South. Do not boast! Do not brag!
7 Be quiet but friendly; proud, but not arrogant; joyous, but not boisterous.
8 Be loving enough to absorb evil and understanding enough to turn an enemy into a friend.
Now for some specific suggestions:
1 The bus driver is in charge of the bus and has been instructed to obey the law. Assume that he will cooperate in helping you occupy any vacant seat.
2 Do not deliberately sit by a white person, unless there is no other seat.
3 In sitting down by a person, white or colored, say “May I” or “Pardon me” as you sit. This is a common courtesy.
4 If cursed, do not curse back. If pushed, do not push back. If struck, do not strike back, but evidence love and goodwill at all times.
5 In case of an incident, talk as little as possible, and always in a quiet tone. Do not get up from your seat! Report all serious incidents to the bus driver.
6 For the first few days try to get on the bus with a friend in whose non-violence you have confidence. You can uphold one another by a glance or a prayer.
7 If another person is being molested, do not arise to go to his defense, but pray for the oppressor and use moral and spiritual force to carry on the struggle for justice.
8 According to your own ability and personality, do not be afraid to experiment with new and creative techniques for achieving reconciliation and social change.
If you feel you cannot take it, walk for another week or two. We have confidence in our people. GOD BLESS YOU ALL.
Of the rare and extraordinary times in U.S. history when the U.S. government actively funded and promoted the arts on a national scale, two periods in particular stand out. There is the CIA’s role in channeling funds to avant-garde artists after the Second World War as part of the cultural front of the Cold War—a boon to painters, writers, and musicians, both witting and unwitting, and a strange way in which the intelligence community used the anti-communist left to head off what it saw as more dangerous and subversive trends. Most of the highly agenda-driven federal arts funding during the Cold War proceeded in secret until decades later, when long-sealed documents were declassified and agents began to tell their stories of the period.
Of a much less covertly political nature was the first major federal investment in the arts, begun under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and championed in large part by his wife, Eleanor. Under the 1935-established Works Progress Administration (WPA)—which created thousands of jobs through large-scale public infrastructure projects—the Federal Project Number One took shape, an initiative, write Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard, that “marked the U.S. government’s first big, direct investment in cultural development.” The project’s goals “were clearly stated and democratic; they supported activities not already subsidized by private sector patrons… and they emphasized the interrelatedness of culture with all aspects of life, not the separateness of a rarefied art world.”
Thousands more whose names have gone unrecorded were able to fund community theater productions, literary lectures, art classes and many other works of cultural enrichment that kept people in the arts working, engaged whole communities, and gave ordinary Americans opportunities to participate in the arts and to find representation where they otherwise would be overlooked or ignored. Federal One not only “put legions of unemployed artists back to work,” writes George Washington University’s Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, “but their creations would invariably entertain and enrich the larger population.”
“If FDR was only lukewarm about Federal One,” GWU points out, “his wife more than made up for it with her enthusiasm. Eleanor Roosevelt felt strongly that American society had not done enough to support the arts, and she viewed Federal One as a powerful tool with which to infuse art and culture into the daily lives of Americans.”
Now, thanks to the Library of Congress, we can see what that infusion of culture looked like in colorful poster form. Of the 2,000 WPA arts posters known to exist, the LoC has digitized over 900 produced between 1936 and 1943, “designed to publicize exhibits, community activities, theatrical productions, and health and education al programs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia.”
These posters, added to the Library’s holdings in the ‘40s, show us a nation that looked very different from the one we live in today—one in which the arts and culture thrived at a local and regional level and were not simply the preserves of celebrities, private wealth, and major corporations. Perhaps revisiting this past can give us a model to strive for in a more democratic, equitable future that values the arts as Eleanor Roosevelt and the WPA administrators did. Click here to browse the complete collection of WPA arts posters and to download digital images as JPEG or TIFF files.
Briefly noted: Google will now let you pay a virtual visit to one of my favorite places on the planet — Machu Picchu, the great Inca ruins located in the Andes in Peru. There’s nothing like visiting Machu Picchu in person. But if you can’t get there, you can do worse than take this tour.
Here at Open Culture, we can’t get enough of the Chelsea Hotel, which means we can’t get enough of the Chelsea Hotel in a certain era, at the height of a certain cultural moment in New York history. Though it struggled as a business for years after it first opened as an apartment building in 1884 and changed hands left and right until the 1970s, it hit its stride as an icon when a certain critical mass of well-known (or soon to be well known) musicians, writers, artists, filmmakers, and otherwise colorful personalities had put in time there. One such musician, writer, artist in other media, and colorful personality indeed has an especially strong association with the Chelsea: Patti Smith.
You may remember our post back in 2012 featuring Smith reading her final letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, which she included in Just Kids, her acclaimed memoir of her friendship with the controversial photographer.
For a time, Smith and Mapplethorpe lived in the Chelsea together, and in the footage above, shot in 1970 by a German documentary film crew, you can see them there in their natural habitat. “The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in The Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe,” Smith writes in Just Kids. “Everyone had something to offer and nobody seemed to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums.”
These fifteen minutes of film also includes glimpses into a variety of other lives lived at the Chelsea as the 1970s began. If you’d like to see more of the place at its cultural zenith — made possible by the state of 70s New York itself, which had infamously hit something of a nadir — have a look at the clip we featured in 2013 of the Velvet Underground’s Nico singing “Chelsea Girls” there. Just after the 70s had gone, BBC’s Arena turned up to shoot a documentary of their own, which we featured last year. Smith has long since left the Chelsea, and Mapplethorpe has long since left this world, but even now, as the hotel undergoes extensive renovations that began in 2011, some of those “extravagant bums” remain.
Much has been made of Mark Twain’s financial problems—the imprudent investments and poor management skills that forced him to shutter his large Hartford estate and move his family to Europe in 1891. An early adopter of the typewriter and long an enthusiast of new science and technology, Twain lost the bulk of his fortune by investing huge sums—roughly eight million dollars total in today’s money—on a typesetting machine, buying the rights to the apparatus outright in 1889. The venture bankrupted him. The machine was overcomplicated and frequently broke down, and “before it could be made to work consistently,” writes the University of Virginia’s Mark Twain library, “the Linotype machine swept the market [Twain] had hoped to corner.”
Twain’s seemingly blind enthusiasm for the ill-fated machine makes him seem like a bungler in practical matters. But that impression should be tempered by the acknowledgement that Twain was not only an enthusiast of technology, but also a canny inventor who patented a few technologies, one of which is still highly in use today and, indeed, shows no signs of going anywhere. I refer to the ubiquitous elastic hook clasp at the back of nearly every bra, an invention Twain patented in 1871 under his given name Samuel L. Clemens. (View the original patent here.) You can see the diagram for his invention above. Calling it an “Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments,” Twain made no mention of ladies’ undergarments in his patent application, referring instead to “the vest, pantaloons, or other garment upon which my strap is to be used.”
The device, writes the US Patent and Trademark Office, “was not only used for shirts, but underpants and women’s corsets as well. His purpose was to do away with suspenders, which he considered uncomfortable.” (At the time, belts served a mostly decorative function.) Twain’s inventions tended to solve problems he encountered in his daily life, and his next patent was for a hobbyist set of which he himself was a member. After the soon-to-be bra strap, Twain devised a method of improvement in scrapbooking, an avid pursuit of his, in 1873.
Previously, scrapbooks were assembled by hand-gluing each item, which Twain seemed to consider an overly laborious and messy process. His invention—writes The Atlantic in part of a series they call “Patents of the Rich and Famous”—involved “two possible self-adhesive systems,” similar to self-sealing envelopes, in which, as his patent states, “the surfaces of the leaves whereof are coated with a suitable adhesive substance covering the whole or parts of the entire surface.” (See the less-than-clear diagram for the invention above.) The scrapbooking device proved “very popular,” writes the US Patent Office, “and sold over 25,000 copies.”
Twain obtained his final patent in 1885 for a “Game Apparatus” that he called the “Memory-Builder” (see it above). The object of the game was primarily educational, helping, as he wrote, to “fill the children’s heads with dates without study.” As we reported in a previous post, “Twain worked out a way to play it on a cribbage board converted into a historical timeline.” Unlike his first two inventions, the game met with no commercial success. “Twain sent a few prototypes to toy stores in 1891,” writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, “but there wasn’t very much interest, so the game never went into production.” Nonetheless, we still have Twain to thank, or to damn, for the bra strap, an invention of no small importance.
Twain himself seems to have had some contradictory attitudes about his role as an inventor, and of the singular recognition granted to individuals through patent law. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the US Patent Office claims that Twain “believed strongly in the value of the patent system” and cites a passage from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in support. But in a letter Twain wrote to Helen Keller in 1903, he expressed a very different view. “It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing,” Twain wrote, “and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite—that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple.”
“The Depression was not fun,” the late YouTube star, Clara Cannucciari, states in the very first episode of her Great Depression Cooking web series, above. Her first recipe—Pasta with Peas—would likely give your average urbane foodie hives, as would her knife skills, but Clara, who started making these videos when she was 93, takes obvious satisfaction in the outcome.
Her filmmaker grandson Christopher Cannucciari wisely kept Clara in her own kitchen, rather than relocating her to a more sanitized kitchen set. Her plastic paper towel holder, linoleum lined cabinets, and teapot-shaped spoon rest kept things real for several years worth of step-by-step, low budget, mostly vegetarian recipes.
Her fruit-and-gingham ceramic salt and pepper shakers remained consistent throughout.
How many television chefs can you name who would allow the camera crew to film the stained tinfoil lining the bottom of their ovens?
Nonagenarian Clara apparently had nothing to hide. Each episode includes a couple of anecdotes about life during the Great Depression, the period in which she learned to cook from her thrifty Italian mother.
To what did she attribute her youthful appearance?
Clean living and large quantities of olive oil (poured from a vessel the size and shape of a coffee pot).
How to avoid another Great Depression?
“At my age, I don’t really care,” Clara admitted, “But for the younger generation it’s bad.” In the worst case scenario, she counsels sticking together, and not wishing for too much. The Depression, as we’ve mentioned, was not fun, but she got through it, and so, she implies, would you.
The series can be enjoyed on the strength of Clara’s personality alone, but Great Depression Cooking has a lot to offer college students, undiscovered artists, and other fledgling chefs.
Her recipes may not be professionally styled, but they’re simple, nutritious, and undeniably cheap (especially Dandelion Salad).
Homemade Pizza—Clara’s favorite—is the antithesis of a 99¢ slice.
Those on a lean Thanksgiving budget might consider making Clara’s Poor Man’s Feast: lentils and rice, thinly sliced fried steak, plain salad and bread.
Right up until her final, touching appearance below at the age of 96, her hands were nimble enough to shell almonds, purchased that way to save money, though cracking also put her in a holiday mood. Foodies who shudder at Pasta with Peas should find no fault with her wholesome recipe for her mother’s homemade tomato sauce (and by extension, paste).
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She recently co-authored a comic about epilepsy with her 18-year-old daughter. Follow her @AyunHalliday
For his final project in Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Matan Stauber created Histography, an interactive timeline that covers 14 billion years of history. The timeline, writes Stauber, “draws historical events from Wikipedia, and it self-updates daily with new recorded events.” And the interface lets users see history in smaller chunks (decades at a time) or bigger ones (millions of years at a time). To get a vague feel for how Histography works, you can watch the video above. But really the best way to experience things is to dive right in here.
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