Posts Tagged ‘Coca-Cola’
“There’s no better feeling in the world than a warm pizza box on your lap”*…
On the origin of that sacred vessel…
Ah, the humble pizza box. When else has such a more modest creation kept so many so well fed? Patented in 1984, after being filed in ‘81 by a Robert E Hall, the creation is described as such: “A box is formed from a unitary, double-sided corrugated cardboard blank having a plurality of scored lines which enable a set up in box form. A bottom panel of the box has cemented thereto a single-sided, fluted corrugated cardboard medium with the fluted side facing upwardly. A moisture-resistant glue is used between the smooth faces of the fluted corrugated medium and the confronting liner of the blank to provide an impenetrable barrier which prevents grease from penetrating through the box. The boxes are manufactured on a conventional production line which is modified by, in effect, running one stage in a reverse direction in order to invert the single-sided medium and to apply the glue in a different manner to establish the moisture barrier.”
In truth, the pizza box has many parents, with patent 4,441,626 simply improving grease absorption and venting (dunno who came up with the weird little three legged table you sometimes see.) Neapolitan pizza bakers would put their pies in metallic containers called stufe as far back as the 19th century. Corrugated cardboard was added to the recipe in the ‘60s, with Domino’s creating something pretty similar to the package we know and love — aka the Chicago Folder — shortly thereafter…
“Who Invented the Pizza Box,” from Modern Delivery.
More at: “Pizza packaging: Overview and History.”
See also: “My favorite dish to prepare is something on the takeout menu.”
* Kevin James
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As we hold the mushrooms, we might recall that it was on this date in 1901 that Chapman J. Root opened the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana; his specialty was the manufacture of glass bottles that would withstand high internal pressures. In 1915 the company entered, and in 1916 won the design competition for what would become another packaging superstar: the iconic 6.5 ounce Coca-Cola bottle.
“In the nineties, culture jamming has been used extensively for the subversion of advertising and brand culture”*…
In the 1990s, a group of radical artists smuggled political messages into Melrose Place…
… Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl.
It turns out all of these objects, and more than 100 others, were designed by an artist collective called the GALA Committee. For three years, as the denizens of the Melrose Place apartment complex loved, lost, and betrayed one another, the GALA Committee smuggled subversive leftist art onto the set, experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and spectator. The collective hid its work in plain sight and operated in secrecy. Outside of a select few insiders, no one—including Aaron Spelling, Melrose’s legendary executive producer—knew what it was doing.
The project was called In the Name of the Place. It ended in 1997. Or, perhaps, since the episodes are streamable, it never ended. Twenty-five years later, discovering this project while researching a book about the culture wars of the late 20th century, I was left with several questions: Who were these people? Is what they made art? Did it matter? And how in the hell did they get away with it for so long?
Television,” Mel Chin [see here] told me, “is the modern cathode ray etching products into our brains.” Chin is the MacArthur “genius grant”–winning artist who was the mastermind behind the GALA Committee. On the phone from North Carolina, where he now lives and works, he explained the confluence of factors that led to him making secret art for a blockbuster prime-time soap opera…
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… Over Melrose Place’s fourth and fifth seasons, the GALA Committee wound up smuggling more than 100 pieces of subversive art—VHS boxes marked STD, a baby’s crib mobile designed to look like an enormous remote control, a painting of “fireflies” based on the U.S. military’s bombing of Baghdad—onto American television screens. Some of the artworks were quite small—a cigar box that couldn’t be opened, for example, symbolically referencing the Cuban embargo—but some were massive. GALA went to the set of Shooters, the local watering hole frequented by the show’s characters, and relabeled all of its liquor bottles with works meant to document the intertwined histories of slavery, agribusiness, and alcohol in the United States. The committee designed an ad campaign for D&D called “Family Values,” which featured silhouettes of same-sex couples with children. (The “campaign” won the character of Billy a fictional advertising award.) Over those two and a half years, nearly every Melrose Place episode contained some large or small political statement, crafted by contemporary artists, tucked into shots with the show’s bombshells and hunks as they faked blindness, abruptly drowned, and tricked one another into thinking they had epilepsy…
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… It is very seldom that we get the opportunity to see art in its original context. When we go to a museum, we are viewing work that was originally intended for religious spaces, or Parisian salons in the 19th century, or the Leo Castelli Gallery at 4 E. 77th St. in Manhattan. Yet you can experience In the Name of the Place in its original context right now: Just stream an episode of Melrose Place from the show’s fourth or fifth season. Knowing what to look for transforms both the art project and the TV show that incubated it. Instead of a series of random curios, what emerges is a surreal embedding of the subtext of 1990s American life into the urtext of 1990s America: the American unspoken, slipped into the biggest, brightest, blondest version of America there was.
Soap operas have always been vehicles for our anxieties about marriage, domestic life, the workplace, and whether we could trust—or truly know—one another. In Melrose Place, those anxieties manifested in delicious plot twists, but the origins of those anxieties—the tyranny of heteronormativity, the AIDS crisis, the legacy of slavery—also popped up, subliminally but repeatedly, in a hundred or so mysterious, often hilarious objects. It’s as if the characters are dreaming, as if all of us are dreaming, and our subconscious keeps trying to show us something: something we could see, if only we could pay close enough attention…
The remarkable story of “The Virus Inside Your TV,” by @parabasis in @Slate. Eminently worth reading in full.
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As we plant Easter eggs, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that NBC aired a made-for-TV movie, The Steeler and the Pittsburgh Kid, which was based on a commercial Mean Joe Greene had done for Coca-Cola two years earlier.
In the ad, a young boy offers the football player a Coke after he loses the game. As a thank you, the player tosses his sweaty jersey to the kid. Considered one of the best commercials of all time, the film expanded the story so that Greene and some of his teammates adopt the boy (played by Henry Thomas, who would later star in E.T. The Extraterrestrial).
Possessed of the cloying sweetness of Original Coke, it is, as far as we know, free of covert political messages.
“My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate”*…
Elizabeth David’s first cookbooks burst upon a Britain newly delivered from wartime rationing… By 1960, when French Provincial Cooking threw its mighty heft against the drab tyranny of “meat and two veg,” the author’s characteristic mix of tart practicality and deep erudition had already begun to work its changes on the English palate. In the late 1980s, David, by that time a living English institution, C.B.E., Chevalier du Mérite Agricole, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, embarked on a study that would leave behind the anecdotal world of recipes for a sustained historical study. Although she did not live to see its completion, her extensive drafts for the work have now been edited (by Jill Norman) and published under the title Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices…
Harvest of the Cold Months began as an investigation (launched in the mid-1970s) of early European ice-cream recipes, but quickly expanded to a global scale, reflecting Mrs. David’s longtime interest in early travelers’ accounts. She then turned her endless curiosity to the mechanical means of producing cold, an art that first emerged in the seventeenth century, and finally to the impact of the Industrial Revolution on means for supplying the world’s ever-growing demand for ice.
Yet, ice cream aside, the subject of frozen water is strange food for thought. If fire is the Promethean gift that first made us civilized, ice is a bewildering opposite; it has been tamed only by civilizations so advanced into decadence that they can warp the seasons, demanding snow in their summer drinks or ephemeral sculptures of pooling ice at the centers of their dining tables. The primal, elementally human quality of the campfire or the hearth gives way to a shiver of perverse pleasure when it comes to the activity that our forebears called “drinking cool.” (What, indeed, could be more limitlessly suggestive than the proposition a friend received in Athens one summer day years ago: “How about a nice tall cool one?”)…
Unseasonable ice brings up the ambiguous specter of civilization at its most aggressive: overlords, empires, and the Industrial Revolution, which eventually replaced the worldwide shipping of natural ice with mechanical manufacture—not, paradoxically, by means of the manipulation of cold, but of heat.Iced food and drink have continued, all the while, to be associated with ill health, sin, and bad company, the sustenance of decadent colonials or devil-may-care gourmands. In 1624, Elizabeth David tells us, Francis Bacon declared that “the Producing of Cold is a thing very worthy of the Inquisition.” To this day, most Italians avoid iced drinks as harmful to stomach and liver; they drink their summer tea chilled, but mistrust it when poured over clinking cubes of frozen water. Ice-cream manufacturers, meanwhile, invite their customers to give way to sin and temptation…
Cool, cooler, cold- Ingrid Rowland on Elizabeth David’s Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices: “The Empress of Ice Cream.”
Related (i.e., also cool): “Pellet Ice Is The Good Ice.”
[image above: source]
* Thornton Wilder (whose advice Elizabeth David happily ignored)
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As we channel Márquez, we might recall that it was on this date in 1901 that Chapman J. Root opened the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana; his specialty was the manufacture of glass bottles that would withstand high internal pressures. In 1915 the company entered, and in 1916 won the design competition for what would become the iconic 6.5 ounce Coca-Cola bottle.
“What is mathematics? It is only a systematic effort of solving puzzles posed by nature.”*…
In 1998, the Cloisters—the museum of medieval art in upper Manhattan—began a renovation of the room where the seven tapestries known as “The Hunt of the Unicorn” hang. The Unicorn tapestries are considered by many to be the most beautiful tapestries in existence. They are also among the great works of art of any kind. In the tapestries, richly dressed noblemen, accompanied by hunters and hounds, pursue a unicorn through forested landscapes. They find the animal, appear to kill it, and bring it back to a castle; in the last and most famous panel, “The Unicorn in Captivity,” the unicorn is shown bloody but alive, chained to a tree surrounded by a circular fence, in a field of flowers. The tapestries are twelve feet tall and up to fourteen feet wide (except for one, which is in fragments). They were woven from threads of dyed wool and silk, some of them gilded or wrapped in silver, around 1500, probably in Brussels or Liège, for an unknown person or persons, and for an unknown reason—possibly to honor a wedding. A monogram made from the letters “A” and “E” is woven into the scenery in many places; no one knows what it stands for. The tapestries’ meaning is mysterious: the unicorn was a symbol of many things in the Middle Ages, including Christianity, immortality, wisdom, lovers, marriage. For centuries, the tapestries were in the possession of the La Rochefoucauld family of France. In 1922, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought them for just over a million dollars, and in 1937 he gave them to the Cloisters. Their monetary value today is incalculable…
As the construction work got under way, the tapestries were rolled up and moved, in an unmarked vehicle and under conditions of high security, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the Cloisters. They ended up in a windowless room in the museum’s textile department for cleaning and repair. The room has white walls and a white tiled floor with a drain running along one side. It is exceedingly clean, and looks like an operating room. It is known as the wet lab, and is situated on a basement level below the museum’s central staircase.
In the wet lab, a team of textile conservators led by a woman named Kathrin Colburn unpacked the tapestries and spread them out face down on a large table, one by one. At some point, the backs of the tapestries had been covered with linen. The backings, which protect the tapestries and help to support them when they hang on a wall, were turning brown and brittle, and had to be replaced. Using tweezers and magnifying lenses, Colburn and her team delicately removed the threads that held each backing in place. As the conservators lifted the backing away, inch by inch, they felt a growing sense of awe. The backs were almost perfect mirror images of the fronts, but the colors were different. Compared with the fronts, they were unfaded: incredibly bright, rich, and deep, more subtle and natural-looking. The backs of the tapestries had, after all, been exposed to very little sunlight in five hundred years. Nobody alive at the Met, it seems, had seen them this way…
Philippe de Montebello, the director of the museum, declared that the Unicorn tapestries must be photographed on both sides, to preserve a record of the colors and the mirror images. Colburn and her associates would soon put new backing material on them, made of cotton sateen. Once they were rehung at the Cloisters, it might be a century or more before the true colors of the tapestries would be seen again.
The manager of the photography studio at the Met is a pleasant, lively woman named Barbara Bridgers. Her goal is to make a high-resolution digital image of every work of art in the Met’s collections. The job will take at least twenty-five years; there are between two and two and a half million catalogued objects in the Met—nobody knows the exact number. (One difficulty is that there seems to be an endless quantity of scarab beetles from Egypt.) But, when it’s done and backup files are stored in an image repository somewhere else, then if an asteroid hits New York the Metropolitan Museum may survive in a digital copy.
To make a digital image of the Unicorn tapestries was one of the most difficult assignments that Bridgers had ever had. She put together a team to do it, bringing in two consultants, Scott Geffert and Howard Goldstein, and two of the Met’s photographers, Joseph Coscia, Jr., and Oi-Cheong Lee. They built a giant metal scaffolding inside the wet lab, and mounted on it a Leica digital camera, which looked down at the floor. The photographers were forbidden to touch the tapestries; Kathrin Colburn and her team laid each one down, underneath the scaffold, on a plastic sheet. Then the photographers began shooting. The camera had a narrow view; it could photograph only one three-by-three-foot section of tapestry at a time. The photographers took overlapping pictures, moving the camera on skateboard wheels on the scaffolding. Each photograph was a tile that would be used to make a complete, seamless mosaic of each tapestry…
It took two weeks to photograph the tapestries. When the job was done, every thread in every tile was crystal-clear, and the individual twisted strands that made up individual threads were often visible, too. The data for the digital images, which consisted entirely of numbers, filled more than two hundred CDs. With other, smaller works of art, Bridgers and her team had been able to load digital tiles into a computer’s hard drives and memory, and then manipulate them into a complete mosaic—into a seamless image—using Adobe Photoshop software. But with the tapestries that simply wouldn’t work. When they tried to assemble the tiles, they found that the files were too large and too complex to manage. “We had to lower the resolution of the images in order to fit them into the computers we had, and it degraded the images so much that we just didn’t think it was worth doing,” Bridgers said. Finally, they gave up. Bridgers stored the CDs on a shelf and filed the project away as an unsolved problem…
Enter Gregory and David Chudnovsky, brothers whose work was so intertwined that they considered themselves a single mathematician. Over four months– and after 30 hours of continuous running– their self-designed supercomputer successfully performed the 7.7 quadrillion calculations needed to produce the image for the Met.
Richard Preston tells the genuinely-fascinating story: “Capturing the Unicorn.”
It was a return of sorts for Preston, who, thirteen years earlier, had profiled the brothers and their successful quest to resolve pi to a record number of decimal places: “The Mountains of Pi.”
More on the Chudnovskys here.
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As we muse of the merger of art and science, we might recall that it was on this date in 1886 that Coca Cola was concocted in an Atlanta, Georgia backyard as a “brain tonic” that could cure hangovers, stomach aches and headaches. The original formula included caffeine and five ounces of coca leaf (from which cocaine is derived) per gallon. The creator, pharmacist John Pemberton, took his syrup a few doors down to Jacobs’ Pharmacy, where he mixed it with carbonated water and shared it with customers. The pharmacy began marketing it on May 8 as a patent medicine for 5¢ a glass. It spread first through the other Jacobs outlets in Atlanta, and then around the world.
“The valuable tonic and nerve stimulant properties of the coca plant and cola nuts …”
– John Pemberton
Pemberton
“The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints.”*…
Sister Gertrude Morgan in her Everlasting Gospel Revelation Mission; some of her work, hanging behind her. New Orleans, Louisiana, 1974
In a new book, Walks to the Paradise Garden, author Jonathan Williams, editor Phillip March Jones, and photographer Roger Manley gather interviews and encounters with artists they met along their road trips through the American South in the 1970s. Some of the artists they spoke with, like Sister Gertrude Morgan, would eventually be discovered by the art-world establishment, while others they met—like former mechanic Vernon Lee Burwell—continued to labor in obscurity.
Along with a deep sense of religious wonder, there is a sense of urgency to the work featured in Walks to the Paradise Garden, a compulsion to make more and more of it until it covered the walls of their homes, crowded the hallways, and spilled onto the front lawn. As Williams writes in the introduction to the book, “We’re talking about a South that is both celestial and chthonian,” pertaining to both heaven and hell. “They are often one and the same.”…
Outsider artists and their work: “Finding Jesus on the Front Yard.”
* Colin Wilson, The Outsider
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As we see through different eyes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1886 that a different kind of “outsider” made its first appearance: Coca-Cola was first sold to the public at the soda fountain in Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia. It was formulated by pharmacist John Stith Pemberton, who mixed it in a 30-gallon brass kettle hung over a backyard fire. Pemberton’s recipe, which survived in use until 1905, was marketed as a “brain and nerve tonic,” and contained extracts of cocaine and (caffeine-rich) kola nut. The name, using two C’s from its ingredients, was suggested by his bookkeeper Frank Robinson, whose excellent penmanship provided the famous scripted “Coca-Cola” logo.
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