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2:03 pm  •  31 May 2012  •  3 notes

Illustration from Philip Guston’s Poor Richard, by Debra Bricker Balken.

On this day in 2005, Vanity Fair first ran the news of their exclusive with W. Mark Felt (“I’m the Guy They Called Deep Throat”), who revealed that he was “Deep Throat,” the source behind explicit details of Nixon’s Watergate cover-up leaked to reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

11:19 am  •  31 May 2012  •  1 note

While researching the history of advertising jingles, we came across this gem from the Chemstrand Corporation c. 1957, “A lady isn’t dressed unless her legs are, too.” Forget the Nylon riots of 1945-46, when DuPont returned to producing stockings in lieu of parachutes (“Peace! It’s here! Nylons on sale!”); forget the 40,000 women who lined up for 13,000 pairs of nylons in Pittsburgh, Pa (June 1946); forget, too, a story rippped from the headlines: “Women Risk Life and Limb in Bitter Battle for Nylons.”

What we really want do know is: is that Cindy Sherman?

The infectious perversity of the commercial jingle: Tim Taylor’s The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture.

4:13 pm  •  23 May 2012  •  1 note

“America is Dollaria.”

—

Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, 1930. This contemptuous term for the United States was evidently common among Central European intellectuals. As early as 1921, Albert Einstein, writing about an upcoming trip to America, expected a correspondent to be familiar with the reference.

From Ernst Falzeder’s “‘A Fat Wad of Dirty Pieces of Paper’: Freud on America, Freud in America, Freud and America,” in After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (ed. John Burnham).

3:44 pm  •  23 May 2012  •  2 notes

“When he sees the part of the screen that has the word that he’s looking for, he punches a little mouse. Then the screen changes and we see lines of words scrolling down, and those are the words from that part of the screen. Then when he sees the word he wants, he activates his little switch again. Then you see the screen changing again and you see the words, and when he sees the next word he wants, he punches the device again. Then that word goes across the bottom of the screen. And he builds his sentence at the bottom of a screen. When he gets the sentence completed, he makes another movement, which indicates that his synthetic voice should speak that sentence. … It sounds simple, but it’s not simple. It moves at the speed of a video game, and very often he misses a word or misses the line, and then the whole thing has to start over. What that means is that working with him can be frustrating. Very often, you know what word he’s after. You know what word he wants to capture. But protocol says you do not second-guess him. You do not move ahead and say, ‘Stephen, I know what you’re trying to say.’ You let him finish. Because he’s going to finish anyway. It would be impolite, as it would be to interrupt anybody talking.”

—

science writer Kitty Ferguson (who helped Hawking edit The Universe in a Nutshell) on Stephen Hawking’s communication style

In Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject, Hélène Mialet (not without controversy) provides ethnographic context for the networks that allow Hawking (and the rest of us) to work as a singular, individual identity distributed into a complex nexus of a materialized human body and its variously incorporated machines.

12:55 pm  •  22 May 2012  •  1 note

“In San Francisco I caught a fleeting glimpse of the type of man who overthrew the cult of the serpent and overcame the fear of lightning—the descendant of the indigenous race and of the gold-diggers who expelled the Indians: Uncle Sam in his tall hat walking proudly along the street past a pseudo-classical rotunda. And always above his top hat runs the electric wire. In this copper-snake, invented by Edison, he has wrested the lightning from nature.”—Aby Warburg, “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” 1923

More in On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art. Architecture, and the Extension of Life by Spyros Papapetros

12:04 pm  •  22 May 2012  •  23 notes

An almost unheard of first edition of Philip Johnson’s catalog (1/1000) for the “Machine Art” exhibition at MoMA from March 5 to April 29, 1934.

From Philip Johnson: Oral History (1991), with Sharon Zane:

PJ: Well, it sounds as if I conceived it. I never conceived anything, so it must have been…It was really in talks with Alfred (H. Barr, Jr.), because the whole Bauhaus approach—that the decorative arts were no longer in existence, but that art could still be made without the handcraft approach—so it was an anti-handcraft show. The worship of the machine was an important part of it, kept over from the Futurists, but it was mostly based on the Bauhaus approach. But you see, the whole impetus is gone, the whole moral socialism of that day, that Alfred really shared. He came through with his puritanism, and with me it was purely stylistic, as coming from the Bauhaus. But Hitchcock and I were more interested in the style side of things—a word that everybody hated and still do—but we felt that a machine made an ideology, a theme that would be good to substitute for the handcrafts. The word we did coin—Alan Blackburn and I did—while we were drinking.

SZ: While you were drinking, did you say?

PJ: Yes. It was about 4:00 in the morning, and the words “machine art” just came out of the air, a very, very good idea. 

**

Read the whole story in Machine Art, 1934 by Jennifer Jane Marshall : :

12:59 pm  •  21 May 2012  •  5 notes

Martha Gellhorn, in a letter to her pen pal Peggy Schutze, a clergyman’s wife in Alma, Michigan, dated March 8, 1949.

Gellhorn on marriage (presumably to Ernest Hemingway):

“My own experience with said state was comparable to living in Sing-Sing, with a touch of the Iron Maiden on Nurnberg thrown in… . But you can’t tell, maybe I’ll get over that terror when I’m an old lady and marry some other dodderer and we will go happily together tomb-wards.”

12:49 pm  •  21 May 2012  •  4 notes

“These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. Indeed, if we identify tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done.”

— Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Violence,” New York Review of Books, 27 February 1969

12:40 pm  •  21 May 2012  •  6 notes

Unknown couple holding a daguerreotype, c. 1850

Speculating Daguerre: Art & Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre, which includes the first-ever catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings, works on paper, and daguerreotypes to appear in print—welcome to the world.

2:32 pm  •  18 May 2012  •  5 notes