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From 1978, a full hour of cable access staple Efrom Allen’s Underground TV– featuring the Ramones.

[TotH to Pop Loser]

As we wanna be sedated, we might whistle jaunty birthday ditties to Stephane Grappelli; he was born on this date in 1908.  In 1934, Grappelli founded the Quintette du Hot Club de France, one of the first all-string jazz bands (and probably the best), with guitarist Django Reinhardt; they disbanded in 1939, as World War overtook the continent.  After the war, Grappelli did session work with Jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson, with pop artists like Paul Simon and Pink Floyd, with classical musicians including Andre Previn and Yo Yo Ma, and with Indian classical violinist L. Subramaniam.  He received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, and was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.

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A portrait series by by Tim Mantoani features now-famous photographers holding the iconic photos that made them famous: “Behind Photographs.”  See the behind-the-scenes video; page through the series in a photo book.

[TotH to Laughing Squid]

As we frame our thoughts, we might recall the cautionary tale of Ruth Pierce (of whom there is no photo):

On Thursday the 25th of January 1753, Ruth Pierce of Potterne in this County, agreed with three other women to buy a sack of wheat in the market, each paying her due proportion towards the same. One of these women, in collecting the several quotas of money, discovered a deficiency, and demanded of Ruth Pierce the sum which was wanting to make good the amount. Ruth Pierce protested that she had paid her share, and said, “She wished she might drop down dead if she had not.” She rashly repeated this awful wish; when to the consternation and terror of the surrounding multitude, she instantly fell down and expired, having the money concealed in her hand.

- Inscribed on the Market Cross in Devizes (England), the site of a grain exchange in Ruth’s time

The Market Cross in Devizes (source)

A city is the pulsating product of the human hand and mind, reflecting man’s history, his struggle for freedom, creativity, genius-and his selfishness and errors.
- Charles Abrams

Beijing-based photographer Jasper James travelled Asia to create his series “City Silhouettes,” an entrancing examination of urbanization (literally) through the eyes of the individual…

[TotH to Feature Shoot]

As we re-read Jane Jacobs, we might recall that it was on this date in 1899 that the rubber heel was patented by Humphrey O’Sullivan.  O’Sullivan, a printer, began by nailing a piece of rubber floor mat to his own shoes; after developing the product and patenting it, he launched a company to market his podiatric progress– in a way aimed at pedestrians pounding the pavement in America’s growing cities.

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More Animals in Midlife Crises at Rumpus (a site well worth poking around)…

As we help our therapists pay for those third homes, we might send deeply analyzed birthday greetings to Italian sociologist, criminologist, and statistician Alfredo Niceforo; he was born on this date in 1876.  Niceforo theorized that every person has a “deep ego” of subconscious antisocial impulses that represent a throwback to pre-civilized existence.  Counterbalancing this ego, and attempting to keep its latent delinquency in check, he posited, is a “superior ego,” a product of man’s social interaction.  Niceforo’s theory, which he published in 1902, clearly resembles– and seems to anticipate– the “id, ego, and super-ego” construction with which Freud replaced his original concept of the Unconscious. (Id, ego , and super-ego first appear in Freud’s work in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920.)

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from Coppola’s The Conversation

Plumbing is a way of expressing or confronting humanity’s “anatomical bottom-line.”
- Peter Greenaway

I found by staging scenes (in A Nightmare on Elm Street) in the bathroom, that it took on a whole other meaning, because that’s so much, for a child, the private room — the room where you explore your body and all the mysteries of the body. It’s also the only room in the house that has a lock. And a lot of tremendous things happen in there — bathing, the sort of baptism, all those things…
- Wes Craven

“Plumbing. Can’t beat it. Helps any movie”
- Ethan Coen

Jim Emerson, the founding editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com, is a man of deep enthusiasms…  He’s written elegant and enlightening criticism and film history (along with screenplays, dramas, and essays on a panoply of topics) for a couple of decades.  But he soars when he’s addressing his passions: film noir, Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton, Barbara Stanwyck, Twin Peaks– and the history of plumbing in cinema.

from the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple

As we ruminate on the real “intertubes,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1973 that the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Roe vs. Wade decision, decriminalizing abortion in the U.S.

Abortion had not been illegal (nor widely considered immoral) for the nation’s first hundred years; terminating pregnancies before “quickening” (the time when the fetus first began to make noticeable movements) was common practice.

Abortion became a serious criminal offense in many states in the 1860s.  The new laws were fueled not by moral concern, but by a new trade association, the American Medical Association– the emerging “union” of doctors– for whom abortion practitioners were unwanted competition.  The doctors were able to recruit the Catholic Church, which had until then accepted abortion before quickening; and by the turn of the century, most states had anti-abortion laws.  Even then, it wasn’t until the 30s that they were at all aggressively enforced.

Since then, of course, the issue has grown in valence and become, at once, a polarizing element in civic discourse and a vector along which religion and government have co-mingled.

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