Posts Tagged ‘cultural history’
“In comics at their best, words and pictures are like partners in a dance, and each one takes turns leading”*…
In his new book, Lost Literacies: Experiments in the 19th Century US Comic Strip, literary historian Alex Beringer demonstrates how the birth of the genre of printed comic long preceded the Sunday Funny Pages. He elaborates in conversation with Tim Brinkhof, who introduces the colloquy…
Most people consider the introduction of the Funny Pages in the late nineteenth century as the birthday of the “modern” American comic strip. Alex Beringer is not most people.
A literary historian and professor of English at the University of Montevallo, Beringer dates the history of comics earlier, to roughly the mid-1800s, a period of prolific and uninhibited experimentation. He came to this understanding by piecing together the medium’s fractured archaeological record, diving through myriad online resources and archives. In the middle of the nineteenth century, New York-based artists followed the lead of their French and Swiss colleagues, particularly Rodolphe Töpffer, the “Father of the Comic Strip,” exchanging single-image political cartoons and caricatures for multi-panel sequences that, many believe, for the first time enabled them to play around with characterization, worldbuilding, and—well—storytelling.
Coming decades before the standardization of speech bubbles and panel borders, these early American comics seem to have little in common with their modern, more streamlined counterparts; they featured sudden and purposefully jarring jump cuts reminiscent of the yet-to-be-invented film montage or musical notes instead of text. One comic artist tells a story through shadows behind the curtains of a window; another, with hieroglyphs the reader must decipher with the help of a legend.
“The audience for this first wave of US comic strips was strikingly sophisticated in its reception of this material,” Beringer writes in Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century US Comic Strip, which chronicles this oft-forgotten renaissance. Out from the Ohio State University Press, the book is one of hundreds of titles included in JSTOR’s Path to Open program, making scholarly books accessible online to wide audiences (read chapter four here, free of charge).
“The sense of flux—the idea that the visual language could turn on a dime—was often precisely the appeal,” Beringer observes in his chronicle of this oft-forgotten renaissance.
Foretelling the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s assertion that drawing is in itself a “form of knowing,” early comic strip artists and their consumers treated the medium as a philosophical exercise; Beringer quotes the observation by media scholars Hilary Chute and Patrick Jagoda that comics “enable an intense focus on how complexly woven stories unfold across time and space and, particularly, how these involve the reader…to generate meaning through interacting with, or themselves shaping, spatiotemporal form.”
While some early American artists blatantly plagiarized illustrations and formats that originated in France and Switzerland, others used them as a springboard, giving European drawings a decidedly American twist. For example, where Töpffer’s character Monsieur Vieux Bois (“Mr. Oldbuck”) satirized the European bourgeoisie, comics featuring his Yankee doppelganger, Jeremiah Oldpot (artist unknown), a New York tin merchant who leaves his family to prospect gold in California, often hinge on what Beringer defines as the contradiction between his “romantic view of himself as a rugged frontiersman and his attachment to consumer goods.”
Beringer discusses this and other critical facets of this period in comics history…
Read on for their fascinating exchange: “Lost Literacies Strips Down the Dawn of Comics,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* Scott McCloud, in his wonderful Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
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As we tell and show, we might ponder where all of this has led, recalling that it was on this date in 2007 that the then-latest entry in a comic-born franchise dropped: TMNT, the first animated entry in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film series, was released. The film (which was entirely computer animated), is set after the final defeat of their arch-enemy, the Shredder; the four Turtles — Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo (voiced respectively by James Arnold Taylor, Nolan North, Mitchell Whitfield, and Mikey Kelley) — having grown apart, reunite and overcome their faults to save the world from evil ancient creatures. It also features the voices of Chris Evans, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mako, Kevin Smith, Patrick Stewart, and Ziyi Zhang, with narration by Laurence Fishburne.
TMNT ranked number one at the box office on its opening weekend, beating 300 (the top film of the previous two weeks), The Last Mimzy, Shooter, Pride, The Hills Have Eyes 2, and Reign Over Me, grossing $25.45 million over the weekend of March 23–25, 2007. That said, the film grossed (only) $95.8 million million worldwide, including $54 million domestically during its 91-day run in the 3,120 North American theaters… as the Rotten Tomatoes consensus read: “TMNT’s art direction is splendid, but the plot is non-existent and the dialogue lacks the irony and goofy wit of the earlier Ninja Turtles movies.”
“[Handel] is the only person I would wish to see before I die, and the only person I would wish to be, were I not Bach.”*…
An essay from Charles King, adapted from his recent book, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel’s Messiah…
… In the summer of 1717, as Handel ran through the movements of his Water Music, floating alongside George I’s royal barge on the Thames, he could only have marveled at his own meteoric rise. Yet he would also have been aware of the precariousness of the regime that now sustained him. An outsider dependent on staying on the right side of the powerful, Handel understood the many divisions that snaked through his adopted society. His income, as well as his art, rested on the favor of people who could also easily withdraw it. A generous supporter or advance ticket sales might cover some of the cost of a production, but opening night then hung on the goodwill of a patron or a public violently sensitive to prices. A change in ticket price could spark a riot, with theatergoers storming the stage and tearing apart sets and chandeliers. When shows ran at a loss, the typical course was for a producer simply “to banish himself from the kingdom” and outrun the creditors, an early historian reported, as one of the King’s Theater managers had chosen to do.
Amid the continuing craze for Italian music, in early 1719, a circle of opera enthusiasts proposed a different model. Their concept was to create a new production outfit structured as a joint-stock company. Supporters would be investors rather than donors, expecting a return on their outlay but also bearing the risk should things fail. A who’s who of Handel’s landlords and acquaintances signed on, among them Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, who owned the Piccadilly home where Handel had lived for a time, and James Brydges, later Duke of Chandos, under whose patronage Handel had begun his first serious attempt at setting English texts. Their hope was to gain a royal charter—the official imprimatur of the king, which could then be used to pull in further partners and paying audiences. By that summer, they had persuaded King George to grant the charter for what would become the Royal Academy of Music and provide a thousand pounds annually as capital. Other investors added perhaps nineteen thousand pounds in all. The Royal Academy’s board of directors named Handel as “Master of the Orchester with a Sallary” and empowered him to steal away Italian singers and musicians from their European engagements.
Over the previous century, Venetians, Florentines, Neapolitans, and others had together set in motion a revolution in sonic common sense: a profound change in the conventions of musical form, perceptions of beauty, and expectations about what counted as obvious or wrongheaded art.
Living in the artistic realm that Italians had created meant accepting the existing order of the world while also undermining it. You started by imagining a normalcy different from the one outside your window. A woman might sing a man’s part as a travesty—en travesti, meaning literally a change of clothes—a term that would only later come to mean abnormal or an affront. A man could sing from the edges of his vocal cords and leap into a high falsetto, his false voice. He could do so with even greater range as a castrato, someone whose testes had been removed before his voice had hardened in puberty, a procedure practiced in Italy, the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhere for centuries. Onstage he might play a steel-clad knight, soaring above the battlefield with the voice of an angel. Castrati superstars—Nicolini, Pasqualini, Paoluccio, Momo, Farinelli, Senesino, Guadagni—were paid gargantuan fees for a season’s performances. In public they could be swarmed by adoring admirers, both male and female. “Some of them had got it into their Heads, that truly the Ladies were in Love with them,” a lengthy French treatise on Italian castrati reported in 1718, “and fondly flattered themselves with mighty Conquests.”
In a theater, the powerful could sound like women. Ancient gods could walk among men. Wars could end not in gore and death but in communal song. Doing all of this well required intellect and discernment, knowledge of musical form and its effects, and, most important, a sense of sociability. Players and singers were guided by instructions written on a staff, but the notes were suggestions rather than edicts. In a soundscape that allowed uncertainty and impromptu change, musicians had to be both self-aware and neighborly, a skill also necessitated by the technology of the time. A quiet harpsichord could speak comfortably alongside a human voice or a few violins, but not more. A lute-like theorbo, with its gentle strings and absurdly long neck, could manage a coiled horn as a partner, but only if its bell were turned discreetly away from the listener. Even a trumpet could cooperate peaceably with other instruments when played in its upper register, where the physics of its metal tubing gave the player more notes to choose from, its timbre more like a warbling bird than a blaring call to arms.
No one had yet given music of this type a label. When they did, the one they chose was also a slur, like punk or grunge. It was the French baroque, used in English for the first time in 1765 and perhaps derived from a Portuguese term for a rough pearl or a mouthful of irregular teeth. To its enthusiasts, that was precisely the point. An orchestra of the period was also an intentional community, often assembled for a specific occasion, smaller than in later centuries, and with no need for a conductor—a role covered by the keyboard player or lead violinist and preserved in the modern term concertmaster. The music they made was solicitous and scrappy, risky and intimate. It soared and swerved, thrilling and dangerous, at odds with everything that had come before, and, to the artists who came after, the perfect example of wildness and excess. But to those who lived it, at the core of their work lay the belief that human creativity could best be used to make an intense, weird, and complicated conversation, sloughing off old conventions while manufacturing bold new ones. “We have freed ourselves from the narrow limits of ancient music,” Handel once said…
Baroque music’s glorious revolution: “The Famous Mr. Hendel” from @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social.
* Johann Sebastian Bach (Upon hearing the above statement, Mozart is said to have exclaimed: “Truly, I would say the same myself if I were permitted to put in a word.”)
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As we conjure creation from chaos, we might send beautiful birthday greetings to Giuseppe Sammartini; he was born on this date in 1695. One of the finest oboe (and flute and recorder) players in London, he was a member of Handel’s orchestra— and a noted composer in his own right. Indeed, his recorder concerto is often performed and recorded in tandem with Handel’s (e.g., here).
“First, we eat. Then, we do everything else.”*…
Tomorrow is, of course, Thanksgiving Day in the United States… and for many, an occasion to take “the cousin walk.” (R)D will be off for the day, returning (no doubt with a tryptophan hangover) on Friday.
Meantime, Alicia Kennedy on what’s become of “the foodie” and what it would mean to take taste serously again…
The foodie is in crisis. For forty years, the word itself has been hanging out in the culture, signifying a person who doesn’t just eat but knows what farm the arugula came from and which chef in town has the hottest pedigree. Where once the foodie had Anthony Bourdain roving the world in a leather jacket, telling them how to travel, what to eat, and how to be in restaurants, his death in 2018 left a hole that seemingly nothing in today’s food culture can fill. How does food emerge from its post-Bourdain malaise? Not even Stanley Tucci searching for Italy could resuscitate the culture into a consensus about who the foodie is now and what they care about.
Perhaps the foodie has become imperiled by the transformation of so many of our meals, snacks, and grocery hauls into mere fodder for social media. Preparing, serving, and eating food is now too often only a prelude to posting: the dimly lit dinner party featuring a mountain of whipped butter beside sourdough bread, the Saturday breakfast with an espresso cup placed just so upon the salmon newsprint of the Financial Times, a sun-drenched spread of shellfish on a trip to Lisbon—all in service to the almighty god of content. Being a foodie is no longer about experience and knowledge. Documentation is in; expertise is out, even if we can all cite Bourdain explaining that Sichuan food with Coke is the best way to cure a hangover.
The problem isn’t just about the domination of food culture by internet aesthetics. Instead, it’s about the way food enthusiasts use those aesthetics to curate away complexity and discomfort, leaving food systems unchallenged and food culture shallow. If all you want is a nice meal on the table, you don’t have to think about the overworked and underpaid farmworkers who made it possible. If you want pop history or recipes, you can gorge on them. This may all be perfectly pleasant. But what’s been lost in the process is the foodie’s potential power as both tastemaker and advocate…
[Kennedy consider two recent books: All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, by Ruby Tandoh (former star of The Great British Bake Off) and Marion Nestle’s (author of Food Politics and originator of New York University’s Food Studies program) newly updated version of her 2006 classic, What to Eat Now. “Taken together, these books model what we’ve lost and point toward reclaiming it.” She then considers the late 20th century cultural history of food and foodies…]
… there’s a fundamental tension at the heart of foodie culture: everyone must eat, making food more universal than music or theater—yet class inequities shape how we do it, turning appetite into a marker of status. This is precisely why the term matters. Unlike other cultural identities, the foodie sits at the intersection of necessity and privilege, with the potential to bridge this divide—or to further entrench it.
Books like Tandoh’s and Nestle’s point toward closing that divide. They recognize that food can’t be detangled from industry and profit—that’s how it reaches our tables—but insist we look at the whole system. Behind the perfect peaches on social media feeds puppeteered by corporate algorithms are exploited farmworkers passing out from heatstroke. Behind every foodie is someone who just needs to eat, especially now that the federal government is fighting about SNAP. The question is whether those realities can coexist in our consciousness, or whether our fractured landscape will keep them separate.
For more than forty years, the word foodie has functioned as an inescapable shorthand for “someone who cares about food.” The shape that care takes is the real question. Nestle and Tandoh are arguing for rigorous care but in different ways: these books ask readers to remember the corporate and political power behind every option at the supermarket, and to be conscious of how various kinds of media are selling us certain sorts of gastronomic pleasure. Read in tandem, they ask us to be active participants in our daily meals beyond mere procurement. The first step toward a more conscientious foodie might be reclaiming the idea that our relationship to food exists not solely through recipes and memes but through power structures and systemic inequities that govern how food is grown, sold, and shared. A foodie’s appetite must have room for both pleasure and responsibility.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Who Was the Foodie?” from @aliciadkennedy.bsky.social in @yalereview.bsky.social.
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As we contemplate comestibles, we might recall that this date in 1789 was chosen by George Washington (on October 3rd of that year) as the ocassion of the young nation’s first official Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving was first cellebrated as a regular national holiday on the fianl THursday in November, by proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln, on this date in 1863.
Read the full text of Washington’s proclamation here (and of Lincoln’s here).
“As long as art lives never shall I accept that men are truly dead”*…
An appreciation of Giorgio Vasari’s seminal The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, the beginning of art history as we know it…
I found Giorgio Vasari through Burckhardt and Barzun. The latter writes: “Vasari, impelled by the unexampled artistic outburst of his time, divided his energies between his profession of painter and builder in Florence and biographer of the modern masters in the three great arts of design. His huge collection of Lives, which is a delight to read as well as a unique source of cultural history, was an amazing performance in an age that lacked organized means of research. […] Throughout, Vasari makes sure that his reader will appreciate the enhanced human powers shown in the works that he calls ‘good painting’ in parallel with ‘good letters’.”
Vasari was mainly a painter, but also worked as an architect. He was not the greatest artist in the world, but he had a knack for ingratiating himself with the rich and powerful, so his career was quite successful. Besides painting, he also cared a lot about conservation: both the physical preservation of works and the conceptual preservation of the fame and biographies of artists. He gave a kind of immortality to many lost paintings and sculptures by describing them to us in his book.
His Lives are a collection of more than 180 biographies of Italian artists, starting with Cimabue (1240-1302) and reaching a climax with Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). They’re an invaluable resource, as there is very little information available about these people other than his book; his biography of Botticelli is 8 pages long, yet on Botticelli’s wikipedia page, Vasari is mentioned 36 times…
…
Giorgio Vasari was one of the earliest philosophers of progress. Petrarch (1304-1374) invented the idea of the dark ages in order to explain the deficiencies of his own time relative to the ancients, and dreamt of a better future:
My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.
To this scheme of ancient glory and medieval darkness, Vasari added a third—modern—age and gave it a name: rinascita. And within his rinascita, Vasari described an upward trajectory starting with Cimabue, and ending in a golden age beginning with eccentric Leonardo and crazed sex maniac Raphael, only to give way to the perfect Michelangelo in the end. It is a trajectory driven by the modern conception of the artist as an individual auteur, rather than a faceless craftsman.
The most benign Ruler of Heaven in His clemency turned His eyes to the earth, and, having perceived the infinite vanity of all those labours, the ardent studies without any fruit, and the presumptuous self-sufficiency of men, which is even further removed from truth than is darkness from light, and desiring to deliver us from such great errors, became minded to send down to earth a spirit with universal ability in every art and every profession.
This golden age was certainly no utopia, as 16th century Italy was ravaged by political turbulence, frequent plague, and incessant war. Many of the artists mentioned were at some point taken hostage by invading armies; Vasari himself had to rescue a part of Michelangelo’s David when it was broken off in the battle to expel the Medici from Florence.
And yet Vasari saw greatness in his time, and the entire book is structured around a narrative of artistic progress. He documented the spread of new technologies and techniques (such as the spread of oil painting, imported from the Low Countries), which—as an artist—he had an intimate understanding of.
This story of progress is paralleled with the rediscovery (and, ultimately, surpassing) of the ancients. It would take until the 17th century for the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes to really take off in France, but in Florence Vasari had already seen enough to decide the question in favor of his contemporaries—the essence of the Enlightenment is already present in 1550…
Art history, cultural history, tech history, the history of ideas– a review of Vasari’s The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by @AlvaroDeMenard.
* Giorgio Vasari
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As we frame it up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 that the first Cannes Film Festival opened. It had originally been scheduled for September, 1939 as an “answer” to the Venice Film Fest, which had become a propaganda vehicle for Mussolini and Hitler; but the outbreak of World War II occasioned a delay.
“Without a map who would attempt to study geography?”*…
History and maps!…
Imagine creating a timeline of your country’s whole history stretching back to its inception.
It would be no small task, and simply weighing the relative importance of so many great people, technological achievements, and pivotal events would be a tiny miracle in itself.
While that seems like a challenge, imagine going a few steps further. Instead of a timeline for just one country, what about creating a graphical timeline showing the history of the entire world over a 4,000 year time period, all while having no access to computers or the internet?…
John B. Sparks maps the ebb and flow of global power going all the way back to 2,000 B.C. on one coherent timeline.
Histomap, published by Rand McNally in 1931, is an ambitious attempt at fitting a mountain of historical information onto a five-foot-long poster. The poster cost $1 at the time, which would equal approximately $18 when accounting for inflation.
Although the distribution of power is not quantitatively defined on the x-axis, it does provide a rare example of looking at historic civilizations in relative terms. While the Roman Empire takes up a lot of real estate during its Golden Age, for example, we still get a decent look at what was happening in other parts of the world during that period.
The visualization is also effective at showing the ascent and decline of various competing states, nations, and empires. Did Sparks see world history as a zero-sum exercise; a collection of nations battling one another for control over scarce territory and resources?
Crowning a world leader at certain points in history is relatively easy, but divvying up influence or power to everyone across 4,000 years requires some creativity, and likely some guesswork, as well. Some would argue that the lack of hard data makes it impossible to draw these types of conclusions (though there have been other more quantitative approaches.)
Another obvious criticism is that the measures of influence are skewed in favor of Western powers. China’s “seam”, for example, is suspiciously thin throughout the length of the timeline. Certainly, the creator’s biases and blind spots become more apparent in the information-abundant 21st century.
Lastly, Histomap refers to various cultural and racial groups using terms that may seem rather dated to today’s viewers.
John Spark’s creation is an admirable attempt at making history more approachable and entertaining. Today, we have seemingly limitless access to information, but in the 1930s an all encompassing timeline of history would have been incredibly useful and groundbreaking. Indeed, the map’s publisher characterized the piece as a useful tool for examining the correlation between different empires during points in history.
Critiques aside, work like this paved the way for the production of modern data visualizations and charts that help people better understand the world around them today…
Histomap: a 1931 attempt to visualize the 4,000 year history of global power. (via Visual Capitalist)
* John B. Sparks, creator of Histomap
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As we ponder patterns in the past, we might spare a thought for Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt; he died on this date in 1897. Probably best known for The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (which established that period as the vaunted subject it has become), he was a historian of art and culture and an influential figure in the historiography of both fields. Indeed, he is considered one the the founders of cultural history.
Sigfried Giedion said of Burckhardt’s achievement: “The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well.”
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