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ccohanlon · 3 years ago

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on the road across america with the merry pranksters

It’s all a myth now, anyway. Tell it however you want. Ken Babbs, one of the original Merry Pranksters

To hell with facts! We need stories! Ken Kesey

On June 14th, 1964, fourteen men and women boarded a converted 1939 International Harvester school bus at a rural property in La Honda, California, and set out on a road trip to New York City. Scrawled on the destination board over the bus’s front windscreen was a single, hand-lettered word: Further.

The bus belonged to a then 28-year-old Colorado-born writer, Ken Kesey, who, just a few years before, had published a critically acclaimed, best-selling novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Now his second novel, Sometimes A Great Notion, was about to be released; he wanted to celebrate — and promote — it with a visit to the World’s Fair in New York. But what started out as a low-key, Kerouac-inspired idea of a cross-country jaunt in the family station wagon soon morphed in something more ambitious: a road movie to be shot on 16mm film with an expanded cast of friends and hanger-ons, and a narrative shaped not only by a meandering drift eastwards across the American heartlands but also copious amounts of lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD or acid.

Kesey ditched his station wagon and bought the school bus for $1,250.

"I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie,” Kesey would tell an interviewer, many years later. Long before anyone had heard of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Kesey was drawing a bohemian crowd to acid-stoked, sexually charged, audio-visual ‘happenings’ at a log cabin surrounded by two-and-a-half forested acres that he had bought (with the profits from his first book) in La Honda, in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of the city. The regulars — writers, artists, musicians, groupies, actors, dancers, craftspeople, sound engineers, students and drug dealers — formed a loose gang. Kesey’s best friend, Ken Babbs, dubbed them ‘The Merry Pranksters’.

“I don’t pick ’em,” Kesey said, “I recognize ’em.”

Kesey wanted the bus to be a mobile extension of La Honda. The previous owner had already fitted it with bunks, water tanks, a toilet, a dinette, and a makeshift galley. The Pranksters added an electrical generator, a sound system (with interior and exterior speakers, microphones, tape decks, instrument amplifiers, and an early version of a synthesizer), an ‘observation turret’, and an exterior seating platform on a reinforced roof. A small, steel-framed deck was welded onto the rear of the chassis to house the generator and secure a motorcycle. The interior and exterior were painted in every imaginable color, except the traditional school bus yellow — patterns, symbols, celestial bodies, flowers, footprints, random words and phrases that were embellished or painted over several times.

Among the supplies loaded aboard just before departure were musical instruments, three or four Bolex cameras, and approximately twelve miles of 16mm color film stock. There was also a large quantity of LSD (probably stolen), 500 Benzedrine tablets, and a shoebox filled with pre-rolled joints. No surprise then that elemental details of the trip itself have become a little hazy. It’s not clear how some Pranksters came to be on the bus and why others — notably Kesey’s wife, Faye — decided not to join them. Nor is it clear how the route to New York was plotted: both there and back, it stuck to the edges of the country, determined to avoid the centre, as if leaving open the option of a fast run for the border.

Nobody remembers how the hooligan-muse of the ‘50s Beat Generation, Neal Cassady, the fabled Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, ended up as the Prankster’s wheelman. Kesey and his wife had met him for the first time a couple of years before, when they found him in their front yard in La Honda,“smiling and rolling his shoulders this way and that and jerking his hands out to this side and the ther side as if there’s a different drummer somewhere… corked out of his gourd, in fact.” Or so Tom Wolfe wrote in The Electric Kool-Air Acid Test, a decade later. The novelist Robert Stone described Cassady as “the world's greatest driver, who could roll a joint while backing a 1937 Packard onto the lip of the Grand Canyon,” and when he turned up at La Honda again, pretty much at the last minute, he replaced Roy Sebern in the driver’s seat. The artist who had painted much of the bus and dubbed it Furthur (at least, until Kesey corrected the spelling) decided to remain behind.

There were doubts that the quarter-of-a-century-old bus would make it out of La Honda, let alone across the country. On the morning of departure, Further rolled down Kesey’s driveway, with the sound system blaring Ray Charles’s Hit The Road, Jack...and ran out of gas. Even with a full tank, its aging, under-serviced engine and drive-train forced so many stops that it took 24 hours to cover the first 40 miles.

When the Pranksters finally arrived in the city of San José, one of the few women aboard, a 38-year-old dancer named Chloe Scott, decided to get off the bus. Cathryn (Cathy) Marie Casamo, a Northwestern University drama major and single mother, was enlisted to take her place, not only on the bus but in the chaotic, unscripted movie Kesey began shooting as Further rattled southwards to Los Angeles and beyond, into the heart of John Wayne-style Southern Californian conservatism, Orange County. After a two-day layover close to the coast, at the San Juan Capistrano home of Prankster Ken Babbs — who, just a year before, had been serving as a marine officer with one of the first US ‘advisory’ units in Vietnam — the Pranksters headed inland, towards the desert.

From the outset, the Pranksters were on a mission. Kesey imagined their course eastwards as deliberately contrarian, stemming the tide of an historic east-west flow of European settlement across the country. Four and a half decades before the idea (and the word) became a debased cliché in Silicon Valley, Kesey wanted to disrupt — “to break through conformist thought and ultimately forge a reconfiguration of American society” — capturing average folks’ attention with random acts of outlandish performance art and whenever possible expanding their consciousness with hits of still legal hallucinogens.

Kesey’s very American impulse to take to the road in search of ‘another place’ — physical, emotional, spiritual, it didn’t much matter which — translated neatly as a metaphor for the chemically-induced, psycho-spiritual trip into an interior self that LSD provided. Kesey and the rest of the Pranksters were ‘tripping’ in every sense. And they were determined to share this with the rest of the country.

“Taking acid led to an expansion of consciousness and a way of seeing things through new eyes, delighting in the world the way a child does,” Ken Babbs explained, later. “It was an experience that was bigger than music, bigger than poetry or plays or novels… It’s about everything happening outside of time, in the past, present and future all at once.”

Kesey’s interest in hallucinogens dated to 1959, when he was working as a night aide at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. Some of the Central Intelligence Agency’s MKUltra-sponsored studies on hallucinogenic drugs (including LSD, psilocybin mescaline, cocaine and DMT) were being undertaken at the hospital and Kesey volunteered to be a test subject. Later, he stole doses of LSD from the hospital — the drug itself was legal in California until 1966 — and conducted experiments of his own within a bohemian community of Stanford academics in Palo Alto, wreaking all kinds of havoc.

Proto-hippies, outsiders, and anti-heroes, Kesey and the Pranksters were modelling with unlikely precision the aesthetic and attitudinal foundations not only of ‘flower power’ but a youth counter-culture that, within just a couple of years, would corrode the accepted norms and values of the suburban middle-American Dream.

Still, none of this had yet occurred to anybody in the early summer of 1964, as Further nosed deeper into the dusty back-country of the south-west, urged onwards by Neal Cassady’s relentless, carnival carney-like, streams-of-consciousness schtick.

The Pranksters found themselves welcomed in some small towns as if they were a travelling circus. And they would give the locals impromptu performances of poetry and music in the middle of the main street, using the bus’s rooftop as a stage. They would clown for the kids, who would run alongside the bus, waving, laughing, when the time came for Further to continue on its way. The Prankster ethos was gentle, playful, and non-confrontational. Beneath their colourful face-paint, the women were an anodyne, all-American, ‘white bread’ kind of pretty, wide-eyed and giggling like homecoming queens, maybe because they were always stoned; the men were mainly short-haired and clean-cut, outdoorsy farm boys and veterans, with just a few mop-topped, Californian college types, who, when they weren’t bare-chested, wore variations of the national colours — red, white and blue — in stripes on their t-shirts and shirts (one of Kesey’s ideas). No whiff of protest, sedition or subversion. None of them looked like hippies.

“We weren’t anti-American,” Babbs recalled. “We always tried to embody the great American ideal, which is freedom: the freedom to do what you want with your own body, and to do what you want with your own lives. We were pranksters, but there was no cruelty or malice to our work, and we never made anyone the butt of our pranks…”

There was, however, little diversity among the Pranksters: no blacks, no Hispanics, no native Americans. And the men outnumbered the women by nearly five to one.

Outside the one-horse town of Wikieup, in Arizona, the Pranksters took a detour to the Big Sandy River — in reality, an intermittent desert stream — to go skinny-dipping. Further got bogged in the soft, alluvial sand. While a couple of the Pranksters set off to find a tractor to tow the bus out, the remainder turned the long wait under the desert sun into an ‘acid test’. When the bus reached Phoenix, later that day, Cassady convinced his stoned compadres to paint A Vote for Barry is a Vote for FUN! large above the bus’s windows on one side. He then drove slowly, in reverse, through the city’s centre, past the campaign headquarters for US Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater.

Cathy Casamo dropped a little too much acid during the river-side party in Wikieup, and for most of the long, hot, night-time drive between Phoenix and Houston, she insisted on dancing naked on the cargo deck at the rear of the bus. Long-haul truckers saluted her with blasts from their air-horns. Cathy earned one of the Pranksters’ best-remembered, (albeit most prosaic) nicknames — Stark Naked — and she was still naked, still tripping, the next morning when Further pulled up outside the Houston home of the best-selling author, Larry McMurtry.

“… Ken called and said they were coming to see me; little did I know that the breeze of the future was about to blow through my quiet street,” McMurtry wrote in a brief memoir, Stark Gets Off The Bus, “A very few minutes later there it came, the bus whose motto was Further, and whose occupants probably indulged in a bit of drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll, as well as almost continuous movie-making and a good deal of rubbernecking as they sped across America. There were Pranksters sitting on top, waving at my startled neighbors with Day-Glo hands…

“My son James, aged two, was sitting in the yard in his diapers when the bus stopped and a naked lady ran out and grabbed him. It was Stark Naked (later shortened to Stark), who, being temporarily of a disordered mind, mistook him for her own little girl. James, in diapers, had no objection to naked people, and the neighbors, most of them staid Republicans, took this event in stride…”

Cathy went missing that night. The Pranksters spent 24 hours searching the city for her. She was found by the police, who confined her to a holding cell in downtown Houston: “She has no I.D., no shoes, and she bit the arresting officer,” the desk seargeant told McMurty, when he had finally tracked her down. “Do you know if she’s on anything?” But before she could be bailed, the police transferred her to a public asylum on the outskirts of Houston, “a massive, grey, hospital building out of a Batman comic book” (McMurtry, again), for observation. The Pranksters decided to push on without her.

“If you’re not on the bus, you’re off the bus.” It became an oft-repeated catch-phrase of mid-‘60s counter-culture – but it was originally just Kesey’s caveat to a bus-load of stoned, unruly Pranksters.

Mais laissez les bons temps rouler!

Wanting to show the Pranksters a better time, Neal Cassady steered them to New Orleans, and after a night of partying in the French Quarter, they found their way to a beach on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain to go swimming. The trouble was, Louisiana in the ‘60s was a tense, racially segregated state, and the beach was one of just a few reserved for blacks. For the blacks there, the Pranksters presence was an unwanted intrusion, an exertion of resented white.privilege, although the Pranksters were too stoned to realize it. When they did, Kesey recalled, “I don’t think a word was said. We all just got back on the bus and left.”

It says something about the antic novelty of the Pranksters, in those early years of the ‘60s, that although they had plenty of run-ins with law enforcement on the trip, none resulted in any of them being busted — not even Stark Naked, who was eventually released into the care of a boyfriend — despite the bus’s cargo of illicit dope and speed. A year later, Kesey would go on the run and eventually face jail time for possession and suspicion of dealing, but in that still innocent summer of 1964, a random stop by the highway patrol or a curious hick sheriff resulted in little more than a request for a licence and identification, a few questions, a bit of head-scratching, and maybe a twitchy caution that the Pranksters should think about being out of their jurisdiction by sundown.

From New Orleans, there was a short run along the Gulf coast, through Gulfport and Biloxi, to Pensacola, in Florida, to visit a buddy of Kenn Babbs, before Further turned northwards for New York City. And apart from leaving behind Ken Babbs’ younger brother John, after a toilet stop in South Carolina — he managed to hitch a ride and catch up with them — the drive to New York was relatively uneventful.

A suspicion lingers that the Pranksters arrival in New York, on June 29th, was something of an anti-climax, a let-down or, at least, less than Kesey had hoped. As soon as the Pranksters hit ‘Madhatten’, as they called it, Kesey phoned his literary agent, Sterling Lord, and told him, “The city just rolled over on its back and purred.” The Pranksters took over an apartment on Madison Avenue, between 89th and 90th, that ‘first off the bus’ Chloe Scott had located for them — Further was parked in front of the 90th Street Pharmacy, just across the street — kicking off what would become a week-long party. Among the first visitors was the author, Robert Stone, an old friend of Kesey’s from Stanford University, who wrote of their long friendships in a 2007 memoir, Prime Green: "He really seemed capable of making anything happen. We sat and smoked, and Possibility came down on us."

Top of Kesey’s ‘Madhatten’ wish list was a meeting the legendary chronicler of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac. Kesey and his friends imagined themselves as the natural successors of the free-wheeling, poetic and spiritually questing Beats, and a meeting with Jack was seen, somehow, an opportunity to gain his imprimatur.

It wasn’t to be.

Kerouac’s former lover, Neal Cassady phoned the poet Alan Ginsberg and together with Alan’s lover and fellow-poet, Peter Orlovsky, and Peter’s brother, Julius, who had just been released from a 14-year confinement in a mental institution, they organized to drive to Northport, Long Island, to pick up Jack Kerouac. When they all arrived at the Madison Avenue, the Pranksters were so cranked-up — the apartment filled with “spontaneous combustion musical and verbal make-believe shenanigans,” as Ken Babbs described them — the world-weary, alcoholic, 42-year-old Kerouac was driven to an armchair in the corner of the room, where he remained, aloof and unwelcoming. When the Pranksters draped a small American flag over his shoulders, “he took it off, folded it neatly, and placed it on the arm of the couch.” Kerouac left without conversing with Kesey after just an hour.

The Prankster’s outing to the New York World’s Fair was also a bust. As Alex Gibney, the American film-maker who, 47 years later, would edit 100 hours of 16mm film footage and un-synched sound Kesey captured on the bus into the coherent, watchable, 2012 documentary, The Magic Trip, told an interviewer, “They thought they were going to hang out in a vision of the future, but it turned out the World’s Fair was actually a vision of the past. The future was them, the future was now, the future was right there on the bus.”

Any doubt that the road trip had taken a wrong turn was erased when the Pranksters, accompanied by Alan Ginsberg, set off upstate to meet Timothy Leary, the infamous psychologist and public proselytiser for the spiritual potential of hallucinogens. Together with Richard Alpert, who would become known as Ram Dass, Leary had set up the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (aka IFIF) at Millbrook — a 2,500-acre estate near Poughkeepsie, New York, owned by heirs to the Mellon fortune — after their less-than-rigorous studies on the therapeutic possibilities of psychedelic drugs had resulted in both men being dismissed from Harvard University.

The Pranksters were not exactly welcomed with open arms. Their amplified singing and the coloured smoke grenades they tossed from the rooftop of the bus as it made its way up Millbrook’s driveway might have had something to do with it. Leary, who was said to be tripping on acid, hid out. It was left to Richard Alpert, to greet them. Only later did Leary surface long enough to say hello to Cassidy — Alan Ginsberg snapped a photo of both of them together in the bus — but he snubbed Kesey and the rest of the Pranksters, leaving them to cool their heels on the mansion’s wide, bow-fronted, colonial verandah.

Neal Cassady stepped off the bus and disappeared after the visit to Milbrook, and without his amphetamine-amped vibe, the long drive home to California, skirting the northern border with Canada this time, occasionally straying over it, was something of an anti-climax. The cast of Pranksters changed: new people climbed aboard, others stepped off; once stable emotional relationships became mutable and there were experiments with what was later touted as ‘free love’. It didn’t work all that well for everybody.

When Further finally returned to La Honda, Kesey urged The Pranksters to burn their ‘bus clothes’ on the lawn in front of his home. “I was done with it,” he said. “I wanted to get back to business. I had books to write, kids to raise. But it wouldn’t die. People just kept coming ‘round.”

In many ways, the trans-continental road trip was just beginning for Kesey and the Pranksters: they had, quite literally, sown the seeds of not only a psychedelic, pop cultural revolution but a seismic social shift that amplified with the growing economic power of youth. Within a year, a Grateful Dead sound engineer turned chemist, Owsley Stanley III, would manufacture almost industrial amounts of LSD for sale to The Pranksters and everyone else in the US who wanted it; within three years, Timothy Leary would instruct a crowd of 30,000 at an event called Human Be-In, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, to "Turn on, tune in, drop out". The city’s much-vaunted Summer Of Love, in 1967, when 100,000 young hippies from all over the USA made their way to Haight-Ashbury to hang out and get stoned, was the culmination of a journey that began when Ken Kesey and the Pranksters first set out across America from La Honda, three years before.

Kesey’s ‘acid tests’ became a mainstay of California’s counter-cultural scene, with screenings of fragments of Kesey’s film footage, light shows, performances by the Grateful Dead and essentially, communal experiences of LSD — until 1966, when California and Nevada became the first states to prohibit the manufacture, sale and possession of LSD (the US Congress passed the Staggers-Dodd Bill, criminalizing the recreational use of LSD-25 in all states, in October, 1968).

Inevitably, Kesey himself fell foul of the law. In April, 1965, a team of local sheriff’s deputies led by a federal DEA agent raided Kesey’s home in La Honda and arrested him and thirteen others for marijuana possession. “I don’t like to divide the world into ‘they’ and ‘us’ but people here don’t seem to be able to leave us alone,” Kesey told a reporter.

The Prankster story descended into farce: Kesey staged a fake suicide, then went on the run aboard Further with his family and the Pranksters. They made it across the border into Mexico, where they stayed for eight months, drifting from Puerto Vallarta to Mazatlán to the dead-end jungle port of Manzanillo, until homesickness drove Kesey home; in January 1966, he turned himself in and was sentenced to six months in the San Mateo County jail, in Redwood City.

By the end of 1968, less than a year after the Summer of Love, all innocence was lost. Neal Cassady was found dying of drug-induced renal failure alongside a railway track outside San Miguel de Allende, in Mexico; Jack Kerouac would die of alcoholism the following year; Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and a few months later, in Washington, so was Robert Kennedy; Richard Nixon was elected president; America committed tens of thousands young American lives to an unwinnable war in Vietnam War; the country was divided by increasingly bloody protests.

America was no place for pranks anymore, merry or otherwise.

First published (as The Merry Pranksters bus tour Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady and Ken Babbs: countercultural anti-heroes on America’s last great road trip) in The Odysseum: Strange Journeys That Obliterated Convention (edited by David Bramwell and Jo Tinsley), published by John Murray, UK, 2018.

#60s counterculture roadtrip america flowerpower hippies kenkesey jackkerouac allenginsberg nealcassady lsd drugs

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kuramirocket · 4 years ago

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The Iconography of Chicano Self-Determination: Race, Ethnicity, and Class

I copied and pasted this from my Mexican American studies course. This topic covers the importance of blooming Chicano art during the 1960′s and its extreme importance for Mexican Americans in expressing and determining their own culture, race, class, and ethnicity during a time when they were looked down upon, faced, racism, and discrimination and were used as scapegoats by Americans and Euro-Americans; which sadly still continues to this day.

I have included images of the art that were created by Chicanos, however, I was unable to find all of them. If you want to see the artwork I could find, please keep reading and learn more about such important history and people that fought and continue to fight against racism and Anglo/American/white supremacy.

In several cities in the Southwest and Midwest with sizable enclaves of Chicanos, there are to be found considerable numbers of images that have become leitmotifs of Chicano art. In their ubiquity, these motifs demonstrate that the Chicano phase of Mexican American art (from 1965 to the 1980s) was nationally dispersed, shared certain common philosophies, and established a network that promoted a hitherto nonexistent cohesion. In other words, it was a movement, not just an individual assembly of Mexican descent artists. In what follows, Chicano art is examined as statements of a conquered and oppressed people countering oppression and determining their own destiny, though not all the producers of these images necessarily saw their production in the political way they are framed below. Examples have been chosen specifically to show how, in response to exploitation, artists have taken an affirmative stance celebrating race, ethnicity, and class.

Race

Without setting forth theories of how and why racism is instituted and continues to exist, it can be said briefly that the Anglo-Saxon settlers of the North American colonies brought racism with them from Europe; found it useful in the genocidal subjugation of the Indian peoples and the expropriation of their lands; and practiced it in the subjugation of the mestizo (mixed- blood) Mexicans in the nineteenth century. In the 1840s, when Anglos were anxious to seize Mexican territory, racial assertions bolstered that desire.

Mexican soldiers, it was said, were "hungry, drawling, lazy half-breeds." The occupation of Mexico was in order since, as documented in the Illinois State Register, "the process which had been gone through at the north of driving back the Indians, or annihilating them as a race, has yet to be gone through at the south." In the 1930s one American schoolteacher claimed that the "inferiority of the Mexicans is both biological and class."

One of the first issues Chicano artists addressed in the 1960s was the question of their Indian heritage. The earliest expression was an embracing of pre-Columbian cultures in order to stress the non-European racial and cultural aspects of their background. Directly related to the question of racial identity, the 1969 Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, formulated at a national gathering in Denver, stated: "We are a Bronze People with a Bronze Culture."

Scenes in some Chicano art illustrate the fusing of pre-Columbian motifs with contemporary issues. One of the earliest such usages was the 1971 mural painted on two interior walls of a Las Vegas, New Mexico, high school by the Artes Guadalupanos de Aztlan. Their representation is tempered by adaptations of the dramatic foreshortening and polyangular perspective characteristic of the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. On one wall, dominated by feather-adorned pre-Columbian Indians, a sacrifice scene takes place. The second wall, echoing the first, illustrates modern sacrifice: a symbol of the Vietnam War, followed by a crucified Christ beneath whose arms a mother with twin babies surmounts a flag-draped coffin with the slogan "15,000 Chicanos muertos en Vietnam. Ya basta!" (15,000 Chicanos dead in Vietnam. Enough!).

Functioning in a similar vein is a 1973 poster by Xavier Viramontes of San Francisco in which the slogan "Boycott Grapes" is flanked by red, white, and black thunderbird flags of the United Farm Workers Union. Above, a briliantly colored feather-bonneted pre-Columbian warrior holds in his hands bunches of grapes from which blood drips over the words.

Some indigenous motifs illustrate the recognition by Chicano artists that modern North American Indians have been similarly oppressed. For example, Victor Ochoa rendered a modern Native American on the exterior wall of the Centro Cultural de la Raza of San Diego: the Apache chief Geronimo, whose consistent defiance of the government in the late nineteenth century serves as a symbol for contemporary resistance. Alliances between Chicanos and Native Americans appear also in a silkscreen poster produced in the mid- 1970s by the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) of Sacramento. A nineteenth-century Indian is shown with painted face and a feather in his hair; half of his face is covered by a U.S. flag from which blood drips. The slogan states "Centennial Means 500 years of Genocide! Free Russell Redner, and Kenneth Loudhawk." No images of Chicanos appear in the poster; nevertheless, a Chicano presence and an endorsement of Native American struggles that paralleled the Chicanos' own are implied by the RCAF logo that appears on the poster.

Ethnicity

A multicultural and multiethnic political structure such as that of the United States is extremely likely to be large and complex enough to involve social stratification and the crosscutting of ethnicity with social inequality. Both these factors exacerbate ethnic consciousness, since the experience of discrimination is related to one's identity and thus to one's ethnicity, which is an important aspect of that identity.

There is evidence to suggest that, beginning in the late 1970s, with the possibility and actualization of social mobility for a segment of educated Chicanos, ethnicity - severed from its socioeconomic aspirations for an entire group - has become an acceptable component of dominant ideology. Nevertheless, true to form, the multiethnic political structure has exerted its de- fining and structuring powers by conflating all "ethnics" of Latin American descent into a single group designated "Hispanic." At the same time, the practice of milder and subtler stereotyping continues to be exercised as the occasion arises.

When Anglo-Americans first began to penetrate areas of the Southwest, then part of Mexico, many points of disagreement became apparent. The Anglos spoke English, were primarily Protestants, came from primarily southern states, and were proslavery; the Mexicans were Spanish-speaking, Catholic, and opposed to slavery. Their diets were different, their family attitudes at variance, and their racial stock diverse. As conquerors, the Anglo-Americans attacked not only the political and economic power of the former Mexican territory but the culture of its inhabitants. "Colonialism," said Frantz Fanon, "is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip.... By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.” As the dominant society and controller of power, the Anglos continued their attack on Mexican culture from the time of penetration to the present-through stereotypes, the prohibition of spoken Spanish at schools, and the scorning of cultural manifestations. Chicano artists therefore attacked stereotypes, insisted not only on the use of Spanish but also on the validity of "interlingualism," and stressed the celebration of cultural symbols that identified their ethnicity.

The stereotype, critic Craig Owens writes, is "a form of symbolic violence exercised upon the body [or the body politic] in order to assign it to a place and to keep it in its place. [It] works primarily through intimidation; it poses a threat ... [it] is a gesture performed with the express purpose of intimidating the enemy into submission." The insidious aspects of such gestures is that they "promote passivity, receptivity, inactivity-docile bodies.... To become effective, stereotypes must circulate endlessly, relentlessly throughout society" so that everyone may learn their significations. It is abundantly clear that the dominant culture persistently considers cultural traits differing from its own to be deficiencies; the cultures being declared deficient (Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Filipino, and hundreds of Native American groups) are considered so with respect to Anglo culture - a reflection of the ideologies that have served to justify the relationship of inequality between European and Third World peoples.

As an image, the Virgin of Guadalupe has a long history in Mexico as the nation's patron saint. In the United States it has been carried on all farm worker demonstrations. It is a constantly repeated motif in artworks of all kinds, an affirmation of institutional and folk Catholicism. The institutional aspect of the Guadalupe began in 1531 as part of the evangelical process directed at the indigenous people by the Spanish Catholic Church. Evangelization was accomplished by means of a miraculous event: the apparition of a morena (dark-skinned) Indian Virgin to a humble peasant, Juan Diego, at Tepeyac, site of the shrine dedicated to the benevolent Aztec earth goddess Tonantzin - or "our mother."

A series of paintings and mixed- media works done in 1978-79 by the San Francisco artist Yolanda Lopez takes the Virgin through a number of permutations. In one she addresses the syncretic nature of Mexican Catholicism, identifying the Guadalupe with the Aztec earth goddess Tonantzin by surrounding the latter with guadalupana symbols of mandorla, crown, star-covered cloak, crescent moon, angel wings, and four scenes from the Virgin's life.

In others of the series, she places her grandmother, or her mother, or a modern Mexican Indian woman and child, or the artist herself as a runner, in various ensembles combined with the Virgin's symbols - a total secularization. When charged with sacrilege, Lopez defended her images as those of "Our Mothers; the Mothers of us all."

The syncretic revival of Coatlicue/Tonantzin in conjunction with the Guadalupe pays tribute not only to the racial and religious affirmations of the Chicano movement but to the particular idols of feminist artists as well.

Among ethnic affirmations that appear in Chicano artworks in response to scornful denigration from the dominant culture are the inclusion of such foods as the humble tortilla, bean, chile pepper, and nopal (prickly-pear cactus); the use of the Spanish language in texts; the rites of folk healing among rural Mexicans; the image of the calavera (skull or animated skeleton) as a death motif; and the celebration of the Dia de los Muertos.

Since the early 1970s Dia de los Muertos ceremonies have been celebrated increasingly in the Chicano barrios of large cities, sometimes with processions. Home altars associated with the Dia de los Muertos were revived by Chicanos for gallery display, using the folk crafts and traditional format but also introducing contemporary variations. One example, by San Francisco artist Rene Yafiez, includes images of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and skeletons, and a hologram within a domed form of El Santo - a mysterious and legendary Mexican wrestler of the 1940s whose trademark was a silver head mask slit only at the eyes, nose, and mouth, and who maintained his anonymity. On this cloth-covered altar, accompanied by two candlesticks made of twisted wire "flames," El Santo has truly become "saint" as well as an icon of popular culture. Like Lopez's Guadalupes, Yaiiez's altar has been divested of any religious intent.

Although the Mexican presence in the United States predates the Anglo, it has constantly been increased and rein- forced by Mexican immigration to pro- vide rural and urban labor. The greatest movement of people north was during the years of the Mexican Revolution, roughly 1910 to 1920, and many of these immigrants headed to the big cities of Los Angeles and San Antonio where a particularly urban ethnic expression arose by the 1940s: the Pachuco. The most famous (or infamous) attack against the Pachucos was that known as the "Zoot Suit Riots." Fanned by the Hearst press in 1943, xenophobic U.S. servicemen invaded the barrios and downtown areas of Los Angeles to strip and beat the zoot-suiters in the name of "Americanism." (This was the same period in which Japanese in the U.S. were herded into concentration camps.

Some Chicanos have turned the Pachuco into the status of a folk hero - as did Luis Valdez in 1978 in the play Zoot Suit, where the proud, defiant stance of the character created by Edward James Olmos epitomizes this. El Pachuco, in the play, becomes the alter ego of Mexican-American youth, the guardian angel who represents survival through "macho" and "cool hip" in the urban "jungle" filled with racist police, judges, and courts. In the 1940s a policeman actually stated that "this Mexican element considers [fisticuffs in fighting] to be a sign of weakness ... all he knows and feels is the desire to use a knife ... to kill, or at least let blood." This "inborn characteristic," said the policeman, makes it hard for Anglos to understand the psychology of the Indian or the Latin. The "inborn characteristic" is a reference to pre-Columbian sacrifice, especially of the Aztecs, and the inference, of course, is that since the Aztecs were savages, so are their descendants.

Class

With the Anglo conquest in 1848 (Mexican-American war), some Anglos married women from wealthy Mexican landowning families to form a bilingual upper class (in southern Texas and California, particularly), but by and large Mexicans in the Southwest were stripped of their land and proletarianized. As vaqueros (the original cowboys, as distinguished from the elegantly dressed charros of the upper classes), as miners, as members of railroad section gangs, as agricultural laborers-and more recently as industrial and service workers - Mexican Americans and Chicanos have been mostly of the working class.

Emigdio Vasquez of Orange, California, fills his murals and easel paintings with both well-known and anonymous heroes of the agricultural and industrial working class derived from historical and contemporary photographs, but without the impersonality of photorealism. His mural introduces an Aztec eagle warrior, a Chicano, and a Mexican revolutionary at the left, followed by a railroad boilermaker, a rancher, a miner, and migrant crop pickers. The procession ends with portraits of Cesar Chavez and a representative of the Filipino workers in the fields of Delano, California, who formed an alliance with the Mexican workers to set up what, in the 1960s, became the United Farm Workers Union

The magazine El Malcriado with caricatures by Andy Zermeno and reproductions of Mexican graphics. During the course of a very effective grape boycott, for example, the Nixon administration in the 1960s increased its purchase of grapes for the military forces. In one issue of El Malcriado Zermefio shows Richard Nixon himself being fed grapes by a fat grower, who emerges from his coat pocket, while his bare feet trample out the "juice" of farm workers' bodies in a wooden vat. On the ground, in a pool of wine/blood, lies a dead body labeled "La Raza." The legend across the cartoon reads "Stop Nixon." Another cartoon addresses the dangers of pesticide crop spraying. In it a gas-masked aviator sweeps low over fleeing farm workers while clouds of poison envelop them. Rows of graves line the background.

Other aspects of labor that have found their way into Chicano art include the steel mills of Chicago, the garment- industry sweatshops of Los Angeles, and the Mexican maids (often undocumented) in Anglo households whose vocabulary is limited to the household and for whose employers little books of Spanish phrases for giving orders have been printed.

In recent years, Chicano artists have become increasingly involved with the question of undocumented workers crossing into the United States to supplement their inadequate Mexican income. Although these workers are secretly recognized by U.S. employers as beneficial to the economy (and business profits), the flow is unregulated and, in times of depression or recession, the workers are scapegoated in the media to divert unemployed U.S. workers from recognizing the source of their own misery. In this ideological campaign, the border patrol of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) plays a brutal role by rounding up and harassing the Mexicans.

The sculptor David Avalos of San Diego has made this theme a central part of his artistic production. In a mixed-media assemblage, Avalos combines an altar format with that of a donkey cart used for tourist photographs in the commercial zone of the border town of Tijuana, Mexico. His sardonic sense of humor is expressed in the sign painted before the untenanted shafts of the cart: "Bienvenidos amigos" (Welcome friends) - usually addressed to the U.S. tourist but not, of course, to the Mexican workers. The upper part of the shaped like an altar with a cross above and nopal cactus on either side below two votive candles, has been painted as a flower-filled landscape with barbed wire within which an INS officer searches an undocumented worker whose raised arms echo a crucifixion scene.

In poetically articulating the importance given the class struggle by Chicanos, the Plan Espiritual de Aztlan said the following: "Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops, and not to foreign Europeans." The plan called for self- defense, community organizations, tack- ling economic problems, and the formation of a national political party. It called on writers, poets, musicians, and artists to produce literature and art "that is appealing to our people, and relates to our revolutionary culture.”

In conclusion, it can be said that Mexican-American and Chicano culture in the United States has been characterized by three manifestations that of cultural resistance (which started at the time of the first contact with Anglo-American penetration of the Southwest); cultural maintenance, which includes all aspects of ethnicity; and cultural affirmation, which celebrates race, ethnicity, and class.

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historichollywoodphotographs · 4 years ago

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The Egyptian Theatre: Grauman’s First Thematic Venue

Showman Sid Grauman knew how to draw a crowd. Beginning his career in San Francisco, he later arrived in Los Angeles where he built the Million Dollar Theater in downtown on Broadway in 1918. It was there that he dreamt up a concept called the “thematic prologue” - a stage show which preceded the movie screening and enhanced the film’s story. Grauman next set his sights on Hollywood, where motion picture studios were fast taking over the town and producers needed venues to premiere their latest offerings. Teaming up with developer Charles E. Toberman, he created a syndicate devoted to these ventures, financed by a local bank. He found property on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard at 6712 where a residence had formerly been located. The land cost $65,000, just the beginning of what would become an $800,000 investment to create Hollywood’s first bonafide “movie palace.” Eighteen months later, architects Meyer and Holler, and their Milwaukee Building Company, provided Grauman with an Egyptian inspired fantasy theater guaranteed to capture the public’s attention.

The Egyptian theme would prove fortuitous. The team switched gears after first conceiving a Spanish Revival building, as Spanish architecture was all the rage in 1920s Southern California. But the news coming out of Egypt was that archaeologists were making spectacular discoveries in the Valley of the Kings (ironically, Howard Carter would open his biggest prize King Tutankhamun tomb just two weeks after the theater’s opening), so Grauman’s decision to go with a more exotic theme, that still aligned with his initial vision for the venue, paid off.

The large property accommodated a substantial outdoor courtyard entry with retail on both sides drawing theater patrons off the Boulevard and into another world. Oversized concrete blocks mimicked Egypt’s desert architecture. The tall walls were painted with colorful illustrations of the Sphinx, pyramids, and other hieroglyphics. Four massive, twenty foot tall columns marked the main entrance were reached through the landscaped 150-foot courtyard punctuated by oversize pilasters with lotus capitals. Specifically designed for the spectacle of “red carpet” premieres, the courtyard also became an outdoor advertisement for the latest film, with props often prominently displayed to attract patrons’ attention. Costumed attendants and guards completed the experience, guiding moviegoers through the foyer and lobby. The lavish interior was also highly decorated with Egyptian paintings; double columns with lotus capitals flanked the proscenium and auditorium walls. Seating over 1700, the auditorium had no public balcony, but there were private boxes flanking the projection booth.

Hollywood’s first ever movie premiere, Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks, opened at the Egyptian on October 18, 1922. The film reportedly cost one million dollars to produce. Admission was $5. Regular evening admission started at $1, then $1.50. It was an exclusive engagement and no other theater in Los Angeles screened that year. Robin Hood was followed by Covered Wagon and The Ten Commandments. Showing only three films in its first eighteen months, the Egyptian set the stage for theaters as a destination for limited releases.

With the success of the Egyptian and its highly publicized conversion to sound using the Vitaphone system, Grauman moved west down the boulevard to develop a new venue in 1926, one that would eclipse his first foray with another equally exotic themed theater, this time of Chinese provenance.

The Egyptian was subsequently leased to the Fox West Coast organization, which operated it as a “second run” theater until United Artists acquired it in the 1940s. In the 1950s, it became a premiere theater for MGM, playing that role until 1968 with the opening of Funny Girl. By the 1980s, the theater was in disrepair, reflecting Hollywood Boulevard’s overall decline. Acquired by the Community Redevelopment Agency, plans were made for its renaissance. As those plans proceeded, the theater was suddenly damaged in the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. It was then sold to American Cinematheque in 1996 for $1, with proviso that the venue be restored and reopened as a movie theater. The meticulous multi-million dollar rehabilitation re-opened on December 4, 1998 to much fanfare. As part of the completed substantial seismic retrofit and accessibility project, the auditorium was reconfigured to add a second 77 seat screening theater.

Like many other public venues, the Egyptian closed in March of 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. In May, American Cinematheque announced the theater’s sale to Netflix. “Love for film is inseparable from Los Angeles’ history and identity,” said Mayor Eric Garcetti in the Los Angeles Times. “We are working toward the day when audiences can return to theaters - and this…will preserve an important piece of our cultural heritage that can be shared for years to come.” Amen to that.

~ Christy McAvoy, Historic Hollywood Photographs

Sources: Bruce Torrence archives; losangelestheatersblogspot.com; Historic Resources Group archives; Mary Mallory, Los Angeles Times

#historic hollywood photographs #hollywood #hollywood blvd #egyptian #the Egyptian Theatre #grauman's egyptian theater #sid grauman #movie theater #movie premieres #theaters #history

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antiquatedfuture · 5 years ago

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Antiquated Future’s International Zine Month

Finally getting around to posting our newsletter, just as International Zine Month is wrapping up. As we did last year, we treated this great month as a chance to add and restock as many zines as we possibly can. We're currently at over 200 zine titles! Which is possibly the most we've ever had in stock at one time.

On the label side of things, we just released the debut from Olympia indie rock supergroup Guidon Bear and have a lot of releases coming up next month (plus an anniversary party here in Portland on August 30th).

NEW ZINES

Behind the Wheel #4: The Thin Checkered Line- A continuation of his look at an ever-changing San Francisco and a nuanced take-down of Uber and Lyft, this issue of Behind the Wheel looks at the realities and logistics of surviving and supporting a family as a driver for hire. ($7)

Caboose #11: Loss Lessons- A braided essay about losing a parent and losing a pet. The odd lessons that loss teaches. The practical ways we make room for grief. A sad and sweet issue of Liz Mason's long-running Caboose zine. ($3) Cat Party #5: More Lost and Found Relics- Under the banner of "lost and found," this issue of the Cat Party zine has comics, essays, and illustrations. ($4)

Fugitive Fanzine, Issue #1- One large newsprint sheet of photos and illustrations by Ben Trogdon and Heather Benjamin. ($5)

Interiors- A collection of comics from M. Sabine Rear on self-care, inspiration, and being a "blind lady around town." Traversing a range of emotions, conquering a myriad of daily challenges. ($8) Lettuce Bee- An anthology with contributions from some of our faves: Jeff Miller (Ghost Pine) on the childhood confusion caused by a Sex Pistols tape, comic artist John Porcellino (King Cat Comics) on hidden creeks, Cherry Styles (Synchronise Witches Press) on natural skin care, and comic artist Jason Martin (Black Tea) on underrated albums. ($7)

Minor Leagues #7- Stories about ghosts, abandoned farmsteads, weird fires, old lives, falling over in the gravel. This issue of Minor Leagues is the second part in Simon Moreton's "Where?", his serialized graphic memoir of life, death, history, landscape, and nature in the South Shropshire hills. ($7) Minor Leagues #8- An impressionistic fever dream of childhood memories told through drawings, paintings, comics, found archival text, photos, and weird odds and ends. Imagine the sketches for a wordless picture book meets Virginia Woolf's The Waves. ($7)

Shoes Fanzine #8: Interviews Old & New- A highly recommended interview issue from this long-running Vancouver, B.C. punk zine. Community organizing, the perspective and challenges of being a DIY lifer, real-life sailing epics. Aaron Cometbus, Shellshag, Matt Hern, and more. ($3)

Somnambulist #32: Fathom- A short lyric essay about facts, Texas, old friends, Olympia. Done up nicely in an old-school cut-and-paste collage style. ($3) Symbology: An A to Z of Archetypes & Epiphanies (Second Edition)- The history, meaning, and evolution of symbols through the ages, in graphic novel form. From Androgyne to Zodiac, this is the most fascinating trip through the alphabet you can take. ($10) Wanna Trade Zines?: Tips + Etiquette- A mini-zine on the intracies of trading zines at zine fests. A useful and compact guide! ($2)

NEW BOOKS

Juggalo Country: Inside the World of Insane Clown Posse and America's Weirdest Music Scene- The first book to deeply examine the world of the Juggalos—the clown-painted subculture that over the past 20 years has swept across North America and grown large enough to be designated a gang by the FBI. A fascinating meditation on counterculture and community by way of a debaucherous undercover journey. ($16.95)

MISCELLANY

Cat Party Tote Bag- The excitement of a party with cats. On a tote. Designed by Katie Haegele of Cat Party zine and Joseph Carlough of Displaced Snail Publications. ($12)

NEW MUSIC

Guidon Bear "Downwardly Mobile: Steel Accelerator"- The long-awaited debut from Olympia supergroup Guidon Bear. Infectious and subtly complex pop songs about real-life nightmares, boot camps, late bills, and scraping by. (cassette + digital download) ($5) Joe Jack Talcum & Gravey Train "Split Tape"- A moon-obsessed split tape from Joe Jack Talcum (AKA- Joseph Genaro of The Dead Milkmen!!!) and Gravey Train (Joseph Carlough of Displaced Snail Publications). Bedroom folk and lo-fi gems from these two fine Philadelphia musicians. (cassette + digital download) ($8) Strange Parts "Oh God, What a Beautiful Time I Spent in the Wild"- Shimmery psych-pop from Philadelphia's Strange Parts. Attia Taylor and Corey Duncan's dueling vocals mesmerize over wild drums, guitars, and synths. A perfectly disorienting pleasure. (cassette + digital download) ($8)

NEWS

*Our pal Rose Melberg (of The Softies, Tiger Trap, Knife Pleats, and so many other great bands) has just opened the Happy Cat mini superstore for all your feline needs in Vancouver, British Columbia. Road trip, anyone?

*Tabling applications for both the Olympia Zine Fest and Albuquerque Zine Fest are now open.

*For International Zine Month, we have everything in our Etsy store marked down.

*The postal-only Freedom APA alternative press association is about to start another round of mailings and is looking for both subscribers and participants. If you want to do either, email zinester and radio DJ Frederick Moe: [email protected]

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dawnjeman · 6 years ago

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Beautiful Homes of Instagram: Rental Home

Hello, my wonderful friends! It’s really great to start this week with a new Beautiful Homes of Instagram and I know this one will inspire many readers.

Dani Ferretti of @GoldCoastCanvas is talented, brave and she is here to show us that we can make of our home a “home-sweet-home�� wherever we are, regardless if it’s our forever home or a rental.

Please, make sure to follow her on Instagram (it will make her day!) and take notes on how she decorated her beautiful rental home!

Hey friends, Dani of @goldcoastcanvas here! I’m so humbled that Luciane reached out to me and it is truly an honor to be featured among such incredibly talented designers here on HomeBunch. I never would have imagined that our once plain-jane rental home would someday be worthy of this. I am feeling excited and grateful (and maybe a little bit like the new girl at the lunch table!).

My boyfriend Brad and I both grew up in South Florida and we are true barefoot, ocean-loving Florida kids at heart. We’ve both bounced around the country (and the globe) quite a bit since leaving home. We most recently moved to Austin, Texas where we’ll stay until it’s time to make the permanent move back home to Florida.

As you can imagine, being away from family and the ocean takes some adjusting to. This is why it was so important that our home in Austin, no matter how temporary, still have space for guests and still reflect that breezy lifestyle we love most. We chose a modern, new-construction home in South Austin not far from downtown. It was the perfect jumping off point for the activities we love most: hiking the greenbelt with our chocolate lab Soko, hitting up our favorite taco truck, or catching some waves at the surf park (yes, you can surf in the middle of Texas!)

I have always loved coastal decor, but it took me years to hone in on my true design aesthetic. Once I started focusing on how I wanted our home to feel rather than how I wanted it to look, everything clicked into place. For this house, I really wanted to create a home that felt like a sanctuary and that was easy to live in – where spaces felt organic and nothing was too precious. I think that is what makes coastal homes so appealing to me. They are meant for the happy messes of sandy feet and salty hair.

Beautiful Homes of Instagram: Rental Home

This is the talented homeowner, Dani, with her adorable dog. I am so proud of how she made of this rental a real home.

Home Location: Austin, Texas

Home Specs: Modern, 3 bed / 2.5 bath, 2000sqft

Entryway

Front Door: Custom ETO Doors 5-Lite Quinque door – similar here & here.

Chandelier: Existent – similar here, here, here & here.

Rug: World Market – similar here.

Flooring

Flooring: 5” Hickory Celebration in Honey Spice by Shaw Flooring.

Wall & Trim Color: Custom formula by Sherwin Williams.

Console Table

For this house, I really wanted to create a home that felt like a sanctuary and that was easy to live in – where spaces felt organic and nothing was too precious. I think that is what makes coastal homes so appealing to me. They are meant for the happy messes of sandy feet and salty hair.

Console Table: Here in Distressed Grey – similar here & here.

Faux Stems: Pottery Barn.

Vase: Target (no longer available) – Others: here & here.

Similar Baskets: here, here & here.

Living Room

I continued the neutral palette into the living room so as not to overwhelm the open space. I grounded it with an amazing collection of pillows from my favorite shops and an earthy, warm coffee table that everyone can gather around. We are just weeks away from getting a brand new custom sofa. I wish it had come in time for pictures but I’ll definitely be sharing it on my feed when it does arrive – so stay tuned!

Beautiful Sectionals: here, here (on sale), here & here.

Tree

Tree: Arbequina Olive Tree – similar here (faux).

Tree Basket: World Market.

Large Basket: here – similar.

Art Print: Deb Presutto.

Pillows

Block Print Pillow: McGee & Co.

Denim Stripe Pillow: one-of-a-kind – Others: here, here & here – similar.

White Pillow: here – similar.

Marble Tray: Terrain.

Coffee Table

Coffee Table: Eclectic Goods – similar here, here & here.

Kitchen

The thing that sold me most on this house was the kitchen. As serial renters, we were used to dealing with suboptimal cooking spaces (our kitchen in our San Francisco apartment had about two feet of counter space!) This one felt like a long-awaited luxury to us. I softened the modern finishes with more organic selections like the vintage-inspired rug, aged cutting boards and handmade ceramic dishware.

Wall Color: Dolphin Fin by Behr.

Kitchen Island Dimensions

Island Dimensions: 42” x 94”.

Faucet: Moen.

Kitchen Rug: McGee & Co – Other Beautiful Runners: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Wall Paint Color

Wall paint color is Dolphin Fin by Behr.

Kitchen Cabinet

Cabinets are 42” Armstrong Sienna Cabinets in Alpine White.

Kitchen Hardware

Hardware: Amerock Bar Pulls in Sterling Nickel.

Vintage Painting: McGee & Co.

Fruit Basket: Shoppe Amber Interiors – similar here.

Countertop & Backplash

Counters are Black Pearl granite.

Similar Cutting Boards: here.

Crock: West Elm.

Bud Vase: McGee & Co.

Backsplash: 8.5” x 2” subway tile – similar here – Other Beautiful Tiles: here, here, here & here.

Kitchen Lighting

Light pendants are the 16” Waikiki from MyBaliLiving – similar here & here.

Beautiful Counterstools: here, here, here, here & here.

Dining Area

Our dining room is small but I knew we needed a sizable table for big dinner gatherings. To make it work, I opted for benches that could be pushed under the table when not in use. I love how it created a cozy little nook on the wall side. The photos above the table are actually sketches of the different homes we’ve made memories in: Brad’s apartment in Sydney, the St. Louis bungalow my father grew up in and the 120 year old Victorian we lived in in San Francisco.

Wall Color: Dolphin Fin by Behr.

Table: Pier 1.

Chairs (beige): Overstock.

Wide Mat Frames (gray): Pottery Barn.

Vase: Areo Home Clay Water Pots – also available here.

Laundry Room

A small hallway leads to a laundry room and powder room.

Laundry Basket: No longer available – Other Options: here, here, here, here & here.

Brass Frame: World Market.

Basket Tray: Kouboo.

Rug: Loloi.

Powder Room

Dani did such a great job with the decor!

Gallery Frame: West Elm.

Pedestal Sink: here – similar.

Bud Vase: McGee & Co.

Faucet: Moen.

Home Office

Upstairs, we have an open loft area that looks out over our living room. I work from home full-time and knew immediately that this would make a great office because it’s a defined space that still feels open to the rest of the house.

Rug

DIY

I wanted to do something unique with the alcove so we opted for some large, diy floating shelves and a gallery wall featuring some of our favorite pieces.

Desk: World Market – Also seen on these “Beautiful Homes of Instagram”: here & here.

Colors & Textures

While I stuck with earthy neutrals, I used this space as an opportunity to be a little more playful with color and pattern.

Desk Chair: Joss & Main.

Pillow: McGee & Co.

Brass Planter: World Market.

Kumquat Print: Nancy Noreth.

Loft

The oversize armchair on the opposite side of the room is a great place for reading (or napping!)

Chair

Chair is from Ashley Furniture – similar chair with ottoman.

Side Table: West Elm.

Lamp: World Market.

Button Pillow: West Elm – similar here.

Wide Mat Gallery Frame over armchair: Pottery Barn.

Guest Bedroom

Down the hall is our guest bedroom. I reupholstered an existing bed to give it a clean linen look like the one in our own room. This room really challenged me to flex my creative muscles and I love the unexpected combination of old and new. The aged metals, rugged handmade nightstands and modern decor accents all come together to create a space that I hope any guest can appreciate.

Sconces: Visual Comfort – Others: here, here, here & here.

Bedding

Bed Blanket in Cool: Coyuchi.

Quilt: here & here – similar

Pillows

Blue Throw Pillows: McGee & Co.

White Pillow: here & here – similar.

Rug

Rug is from McGee & Co.

Paint Color

Walls: Dolphin Fin by Behr.

Curtains: Pottery Barn.

Desk

Desk is from Joss & Main.

Mirror: here – similar.

Chair

Chair: McGee & Co.

Desk Lamp: Wayfair.

Vase: Areo Home Clay Water Pots – also available here.

Clock: McGee & Co.

Panoramic Painting (in closet): McGee & Co.

Guest Bathroom

I extended this same theme of old and new into the guest bathroom.

Rug: Loloi.

Wall Paint Color

Hardware: Amerock Bar Pulls in Sterling Nickel.

Prints by Marcelle Calder.

Counters: Cultured marble.

Faucets: Moen.

Master Bedroom

I took my time designing our master bedroom and it is my absolute favorite room in the house. I wanted to keep this room clean and simple, while still giving it enough layers to feel cozy. I stuck with two main colors – a blue/grey and cream – and brought things to life with lots of different textures. From the driftwood nightstands to the chunky cotton quilt to the faded rug, everything in this room is meant to feel a bit organic and weathered, yet still refined.

Paint Color & Bedding

Wall Color: Silver Drop by Behr.

Sunset Painting: McGee & Co.

Quilt: West Elm (I highly recommend bedding by West Elm).

Striped Bed Blanket in Gray: Evangeline Linens Pinstripe Blanket 100% Cotton – similar here & here.

Blue Throw Pillows: McGee & Co.

Bed & Rug

Bed: Skyline Furniture – also here (without nailhead).

Beautiful Throws: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Rug: Surya.

Nightstand

Nightstands are from Pottery Barn.

Nightstand Decor

Basket Tray (with books): here.

Vase: West Elm.

Table Lamps: Pottery Barn.

Master Bathroom

In our master bathroom, the contrast of the dark tiling and the white finishes adds a touch of drama. I kept decor simple with some minimalist palm prints and a faded vintage-inspired runner.

Rug: No longer available – similar here.

Cabinetry

Cabinets: Armstrong Sienna Cabinets in Alpine White.

Tile: 16 x 24 – existing – similar here, here & here.

Towels: Parachute Home.

Beautiful Hampers: here, here, here & here.

Countertop

Counters: Cultured Marble.

Vase: McGee & Co.

Hand towels: McGee & Co – similar here.

Hardware: Amerock Bar Pulls in Sterling Nickel.

Faucets: Moen.

Backyard

Having usable outdoor space was really important to us. However, when we moved in, our backyard was just a plain patch of grass. Since we’re renting, we worked with our landlord to come up with an affordable solution. With my dad’s help, we built this raised gravel patio ourselves!

Bistro Set: Ikea.

Outdoor Furniture

Outdoor Sectional: No longer available – Others: here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Umbrella: here – similar.

Stool / Side Table: Safavieh.

Home-Sweet-Home

The new raised gravel patio ended up being a hit in the neighborhood and inevitably, all of our gatherings end up out here. I’m so glad we went for it! It serves as a reminder that no matter where you’re living at the moment, it’s always worth a little investment to make it feel like home. You don’t have to wait for your dream house!

Many thanks to Dani for sharing all of the details above.

Make sure to follow her on Instagram to see more of her beautiful home!

Blog: Gold Coast Canvas.

Best Sales of the Month:

Thank you for shopping through Home Bunch. I would be happy to assist you if you have any questions or are looking for something in particular. Feel free to contact me and always make sure to check dimensions before ordering. Happy shopping!

Serena & Lily: 20% off Dining Event. Use code: ENTERTAINING

Wayfair: Up to 75% OFF – President’s Day Huge Sales on Decor, Furniture & Rugs!!!

Joss & Main: End of Season Sale: Up to 85% Off!!! Free shipping with code: STARS

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Urban Outfitters: Hip & Affordable Home Decor.

Horchow: High Quality Furniture and Decor. Up to 30% off the entire site!

Nordstrom: Up to 40% OFF!

Arhaus: Up to 60% OFF!

Posts of the Week:

Beautiful Homes of Instagram: Fixer Upper.

Colorful Coastal Interiors.

Beautiful Homes of Instagram: Horse Farm.

Modern Coastal Shingle Home.

Empty Nester Kitchen Renovation.

Kitchen Renovation with Before & After Pictures.2019 New Year Home Tour.

Full-scale Home Remodel Inspiration.

Beautiful Homes of Instagram: How to Build your own Home.

Interior Design Ideas: Grey Shingle Home.

Connecticut Beach House.

Interior Design Ideas: Colorful Interiors.

New England Home.

Interior Design Ideas: Home Renovation.Classic Colonial Home Design. Family-friendly Home Design.

New Year, New Beautiful Homes of Instagram.

Grey Kitchen Paint Colors.

Follow me on Instagram: @HomeBunch

You can follow my pins here: Pinterest/HomeBunch

See more Inspiring Interior Design Ideas in my Archives.

“Dear God,

If I am wrong, right me. If I am lost, guide me. If I start to give-up, keep me going.

Lead me in Light and Love”.

Have a wonderful day, my friends and we’ll talk again tomorrow.”

with Love,

Luciane from HomeBunch.com

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italianartsociety · 7 years ago

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By Jean Marie Carey

Novalis, the poet, naturalist, mystic, philosopher, and founder of Romanticism died 25 March 1801. The literary achievement of Novalis, born 2 May 1772, who worked in his family’s Saxony salt mine for much of his short life, was mostly overlooked during his life.

Novalis’ unfinished 1800 novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen introduces both the "blue flower," the symbol that became an emblem for all of German Romanticism, and the fragment as literary device. But the subject of the narrative is the titular character’s trip to Italy, a journey Novalis, then bedridden and dying of tuberculosis, realized he would not make but imagined with poignancy nonetheless, concentrating greatly on what he imagined the Italian art “scene” of the 1700s to be:

The mind longs for rest and variety. In no other country are there more charming singers, graceful dancers, and glorious artists. …Italy softens the manners and enlarges the scope of conversation. The ladies adorn all social gatherings; nor need they fear remark, if they prove their talent by emulating the mental activity of the men. Friendship and love are the guiding sprits of these pleasant meetings. Italians .. have much greater artistic talent than we have.

From Heinrich von Osterdingen in Novalis: His Life, Thought, and Work translated by M.J. Hope. (Chicago: McLurg, 1891), p. 64.

Andrea Capponi, Carved Niche (Villa Gamberaia (Florence, Italy)); 18th century; 20th century restoration. Photographer: Elizabeth Barlow Rogers.

Length of Italian silk and velvet, c. 1750. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nr. 1992.15.

Anonymous Italian artist, Apollino, c. 1735. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, 54.1691.

Architects: Gabriele Montani and Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt; painters: Martino Altomonte and Leopold Kupelwieser. Peterskirche: The Healing of the Lame at the Temple Gate; The Virgin Immaculate; Interior: detail view of main altar from south. Building: 1702-1733; Altomonte altarpiece: early 18th century. Vienna, Austria.

Giovanni Volpato, L'Astrologio, after a painting by Francesco Maggiotto, 1743. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Nr. 1988.1.265.

Novalis, (c.1799), portrait by Franz Gareis.

Further Reading: The Novices of Sais: With illustrations by Paul Klee, translated by Ralph Manheim. (Brooklyn: Archipelago, 2005)

Novalis. Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Chicago: Waveland Press, 1990.

#otd #novalis #the novices of sais #heinrich von ofterdingen #Gabriele Montani #Andrea Capponi #Giovanni Volpato #Francesco Maggiotto #romanticism #neoclassicism #art #italian #italian art #architecture #peterskirche #fabric #textile #Germany and Italy

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vikingpaintingandremodeling · 4 months ago

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Viking Painting and Remodeling, the trusted house painters in South San Francisco. Our team of experienced painters is dedicated to providing high-quality painting services that exceed your expectations. We offer a comprehensive range of services, including exterior and interior painting, color consultation, and surface preparation.

Viking Painting and Remodeling 29 Wilms ave, South San Francisco, CA 94080 (415) 828–1707

My Official Website: https://vikingpaintingandremodeling.com/ Google Plus Listing: https://www.google.com/maps?cid=6451147342816174543

Service We Offer:

Residential Painting Commercial Painting

Twitter: https://x.com/VikingPaintin Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/VikingPaintingandRemodeling/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vikingpaintingandremodelingca/

#House Painters South San Francisco #House Painting Service South San Francisco #Exterior House Painting South San Francisco #South San Francisco Painting #Best Painter Near Me

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architectnews · 3 years ago

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Theorem Winery, Calistoga, California

Theorem Winery, Californian Building Development, CA Commercial Development, USA Architecture Project, Images

Theorem Winery in Calistoga

Jun 25, 2021

Design: Richard Beard Architects

Location: Calistoga, California, USA

Theorem Winery

Theorem Winery is located west of downtown Calistoga, California, within the Diamond Mountain appellation in Napa Valley. Eschewing the ubiquitous large winery venues focused on handling hundreds of guests at one time, Theorem is designed as an intimate, bespoke experience where hospitality reigns supreme.

The 60-acre complex features a cluster of late-19th century structures originally built by Beverley Cole as a country retreat to escape the fog of San Francisco (Cole is noted for establishing what would become the University of California/San Francisco Medical System).

The property includes a small schoolhouse and a distinguished Greek revival cottage known as the Cole House, which was restored and remodeled by Richard Beard prior to master planning the property for the new winery. The winery is designed to complement the restored historic structures, taking inspiration from the vernacular agricultural buildings found on site and in the region. Clad in dark-toned materials to visually recede into the surrounding landscape, the complex takes second seat to views of Mount St. Helena to the north and vineyards to the south.

Modest in scale, the 8,977-square-foot venue is coupled with a carefully orchestrated guest experience, which begins as guests pass through an exterior arbor/trellis. Daylight, and its manipulation, becomes an important element in stripping away the world beyond and enabling guests to become fully emerged in the wine experience. The trellis and welcome/reception area serve as the first step in lowering light levels to allow visitors’ retinas to adjust. From there, guests walk down a mirror-lined staircase to the darker subterranean barrel room where the tasting journey begins.

Exposed, vertically oriented, board-formed concrete walls wrap the space: its raw, unfinished nature recalling the nascent wine resting in adjacent barrels. The area is marked by a simple table and a pair of bronze wings affixed to the wall; the wings serving as a popular photo/social media location. Next, guests are escorted to any number of tasting sites within the complex: in front of the schoolhouse, at the lookout point, under the barn trellis, or in the fermentation room.

The two-story building, featuring dark roofing and siding, is a steel structure with a cross-axis floor plan. Axial vistas allow for views from and through the winery facility. Large, solid oak sliding barn doors provide full closure when desired. Steel-framed glass doors and windows fill the interior spaces with natural light, reducing the need for supplemental lighting in the fermentation room and visually connecting interior spaces to the natural surroundings. The roof of the primary fermentation room features a continuous monitor to provide ample daylight into the structure.

Below-ground barrel storage provides improved, at-grade access for wine production and a cool, consistent temperature in which to mature wine. Additional areas include the crush pad, various storage rooms, a full restroom, and a laboratory/office. Production capacity is 8,412 cases. Tasting and tours are by appointment only and limited to just a few people at a time. With wine and landscape taking center stage, Theorem Winery provides an intimate and nuanced experience that is simultaneously familiar and timeless.

Theorem Winery in Calistoga, California – Building Information

Design: Richard Beard Architects Richard Beard Architects project team Richard Beard, Principal Katherine Schwertner, Project Manager Bruno Lopez-Moncada, Project Architect

Project team Richard Beard Architects (architecture and site master planning) Nicholas Vincent Design (interior design) Finley Construction (contractor) Applied Civil Engineering (civil engineer) Blasen Landscape Architecture (landscape architecture) ZFA Structural Engineers (structural engineer) TEP Engineers (mechanical and plumbing Engineers) Refrigeration Technology Inc (refrigeration engineer) Hiram Banks Lighting Design (lighting engineer)

Materials/Fabricators Soule Building Systems (prefabricated steel structure) Milgard Ultra Series (fiberglass windows) Crown Industrial (fabricator for custom oak sliding doors and all exterior metal doors) Heath Ceramics (bathroom tiles) Vibia (production room chandelier) John Pomp (custom Tasting Room chandelier made of Jules glass) FSB (door hardware) Reclaimed walnut (custom shelving made with walnut from the site) Reception desk (custom-designed bar with painted white oak, leather panels, and Calacatta stone top) Chandelier (hand-cast, sculpted glass crystal chandelier on blackened steel frame) Bar stools (custom, bleached Walnut and Bronze adjustable bar stools with leather seats) Cabinet (Viennese Secessionist Cabinet with Brass hardware and inlays, circa 1900) Shelves (custom copper floating shelves)

Photography by Paul Dyer

Theorem Winery in Calistoga images / information received 250621>

Location: Mar Vista, Marin County, North California, USA

Californian Buildings

San Francisco Architectural Designs – chronological list

San Francisco Architectural Tours by e-architect

HillSide House in California, Mill Valley Design: Zack de Vito Architecture photo : Bruce Damonte, Bruce Damonte Photography HillSide House in Mill Valley

San Francisco Architecture Studios – architecture firm listings on e-architect

Big Ranch Road Retreat in the Napa Valley Design: WDA (William Duff Architects) photograph © Matthew Millman Photography Napa Valley Barn Renewal

Hanover Page Mill Associates, LLC, Stanford Research Park, Palo Alto Design: Form4 Architecture photo courtesy of The Chicago Athenaeum Hanover Page Mill Palo Alto Building

The Italian Swiss Colony Building Lobby Architects: jones | haydu photograph : Matthew Millman The Italian Swiss Colony Building Lobby

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Comments / photos for the Theorem Winery in Calistoga design by Tim Gorter, Architect USA page welcome

The post Theorem Winery, Calistoga, California appeared first on e-architect.

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nowtravel · 3 years ago

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48 HOURS IN THE BAY AREA

The Bay Area is hands down one of the most beautiful parts of America. From rolling hills, to the crashing waves, old growth forests and breathtaking vistas, it’s hard not to leave your heart in San Francisco. Here is a 36 hour itinerary to see some of the most beautiful spots the area has to offer.

DAY 1:

Head to Point Reyes, an hour or so drive North from San Francisco. From its thunderous ocean breakers crashing against rocky headlands and expansive sand beaches to its open grasslands, brushy hillsides, and forested ridges, Point Reyes offers over 1500 species of plants and animals to discover. Home to several cultures over thousands of years, the Seashore preserves a tapestry of stories and interactions of people. Point Reyes offers endless exploration.

After Point Reyes, swing back down and start heading south again to visit Mount Tamalpais, which is far from the most famous mountain in California, but truly one of the most stunning views. Just north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Tamalpais State Park rises majestically from the heart of Marin County. Its deep canyons and sweeping hillsides are cloaked with cool redwood forests, oak woodlands, open grasslands, and sturdy chaparral.

If you’re feeling peckish post Mount Tam, you can stop at the Mill Valley In N Out to fuel up. It’s cliched, and many say overrated, but In-N-0ut remains a Californian classic (despite spreading its wings in other states) with its iconic red and white styling. There’s just nothing better than a double double animal style (from the “secret” menu) and a milkshake on the side! The fries are an acquired taste, but if they’re a little raw for your taste, you can always ask they be double-fried for a new taste sensation!

After filling up on burgers and fries, everyone could use a walk! Last stop of the day is Muir Woods. Federally protected as a National Monument since 1908, Muir Woods offers stunning old growth coast redwoods, cooling their roots in the freshwater of Redwood Creek and lifting their crowns to reach the sun and fog. With a primeval feel, the forest offers both refuge and laboratory.

DAY 2:

Today is for the city! First stop is historic Coit Tower. An emblem of the San Francisco skyline since 1933, the slender white column hides a secret inside: murals cover the building’s interior walls. Painted in 1934 by a group of artists employed by the Public Works of Art Project, a precursor to the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the murals depict life in California during the Depression.

From Coit Tower, make your way to Sutro Tower for the best views the city has to offer. The Bay Area’s most visible icon is actually the power icon. The tower is actually used by 10 television stations, 3 FM radio stations, satellite and cable providers, and nearly two dozen public and commercial wireless communication services. You can either hike up (be careful, that climb is a killer!) or drive, as there is a parking lot on offer.

After descending Sutro Tower, if you turn right you’ll come to one of San Francisco’s most cultural and historical neighborhoods: The Castro. Originally a working-class neighborhood settled by Scandinavians in the 1920s, by the 1970s the neighborhood had retained a new identity as being a safe space for the counter-cultural LGBTQ movement. The neighborhood has much to offer beyond its rich history, with a great nightlife scene, beautiful murals, and delicious restaurants.

After the Castro, it’s time to experience one of San Francisco’s most delicious culinary offerings: dungeness crab. For the best in the city, you’ll need to head far from the hustle and bustle from downtown to way over on Bayshore boulevard, where sits The Old Clam House, San Francisco’s oldest restaurant operating in the same location. While not located in one of the hotspot culinary neighborhoods, The Old Clam House is well worth a visit for their crab alone. Order the hot killer crab which is served sizzling on a cast iron pan, is 2lbs+ of perfectly cooked crab dripping in just the right amount of The Old Clam House’s secret garlic sauce. An absolutely incredible feast, no one should miss this classic San Francisco experience!

Next, pick up a bottle of vino, then go over to Mission Dolores Park for one of their outdoor movie screenings. You never know what you’re going to watch, but you’ll always make some new friends!

Finally, I always love seeing a city by night as well as by day. Head down to the waterfront to see the Ferry building and Bay Bridge lit up beautifully.

And then, sadly, our time in San Francisco is up! A darling city and if you’re not careful, it will steal your heart forever!

About Sera Herold

Originally from Washington state, Sera Herold started her love affair with travel by frequently visiting Vancouver BC while growing up. Having visited 5 continents so far, Sera looks forward to someday taking a trip down under to Oceana, and extremely down under to Antarctica, to get to experience what each continent has to offer. Sera’s perfect trip involves some adventure, some relaxing, and a ton of delicious local food!

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seanmccaughan · 6 years ago

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The Wolfsonian-FIU Museum, which has an extensive Art Deco collection has announced something everybody probably assumed it did years ago, its first-ever major Art Deco exhibition. Check it out.

The Wolfsonian–FIU Opens its First-Ever Major Exhibition Devoted to Art Deco in Fall 2018

Deco: Luxury to Mass Market (opening October 19, 2018) will trace Art Deco’s European origins, migration to the U.S., and spectacular culmination in 1930s Miami Beach

Walking tour neighborhood guide to bring the Wolfsonian experience out of the galleries and into the streets

MIAMI BEACH (May 23, 2018) — The Wolfsonian–Florida International University announces the museum’s first large-scale exhibition devoted to Art Deco, the style so central to South Beach’s world-famous architecture. On view starting October 19, 2018 and continuing for an extended run, Deco: Luxury to Mass Market will map the trajectory of Art Deco’s influence from its first appearance in Paris to its adoption by American tastemakers and trendsetters through more than 100 works from the Wolfsonian collection.

“This is a special opportunity for The Wolfsonian to share its vast collection of Art Deco objects in a way that it has never done before,” said Whitney Richardson, who co-organized the exhibition with fellow Wolfsonian curators Silvia Barisione and Shoshana Resnikoff. “There’s so much curiosity about how a style introduced in Paris came to be realized so impressively, and in such a varied way, halfway around the world on Miami Beach. Deco tackles that very question by embracing a true Wolfsonian strength: digging into the social meaning behind a style, and considering its evolution.”

Added Barisione: “The exhibition exposes visitors to the unfamiliar dimensions of Art Deco. A style that became so closely associated with France was expressed in unique ways all over the word, from India to Russia. The show speaks to how an aesthetic embraced in far-flung places could be infused with the local influences and national traditions of the designers.”

Orienting Wolfsonian visitors to the history of Art Deco, the exhibition will begin with an introduction to the style’s hallmarks and beginnings in 1925. The Paris world’s fair, Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, originally brought Art Deco to public visibility under the name “art moderne” in an effort to raise the status of the applied arts and industrial design to the level of fine art. Typified by the heavy use of ornament and stylized, natural motifs, the style at first emphasized luxury and borrowed greatly from a variety of historical sources such as Art Nouveau, the colonial exoticism of Mayan temples and Egyptian tombs, Cubist geometric forms, and ballet set design and costumes. It immediately proved incredibly popular, in part thanks to pioneer adopters like the influential Parisian department stores Bon Marché and Printemps creating display rooms fully decked out in the style to provide inspiration and showcase products.

The exhibition moves on to how Art Deco changed with its migration across Europe and particularly its journey overseas. Though the U.S. did not formally participate in the 1925 Paris exposition, its government delegated a commission of museum directors, department store owners, designers, and manufacturers to attend the fair and bring back ideas. Thus, many American audiences first encountered the style through museum exhibitions (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in department stores (Lord & Taylor, John Wanamaker). European émigré designers trained at the Wiener Werkstätte or Deutscher Werkbund and steeped in modernist thinking likewise brought Art Deco to the U.S., where it began to take on uniquely American motifs like the skyscraper and form associations with progressive architecture and industry. The Great Depression put to bed Art Deco’s emphasis on luxury in favor of New Deal-inspired function and sleeker aesthetics. Affordability and streamlining were in vogue—trends that dovetailed with the notion of pushing a dampened economy into a promising future.

Deco concludes with the style’s pinnacle on Miami Beach as represented in hotels such as the Essex House, Kent, and New Yorker. After debuting his Florida Tropical House in the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair’s “Home of Tomorrow” section, architect Robert Law Weed returned to South Florida to help realize a new version of Deco design on a citywide-level, one informed by middle-class tourism and relaxation. The hundreds of Art Deco buildings that remain today, many of which have since been converted into apartments, still capture the elegance and carefree spirit of early Miami Beach—“where summer spends the winter.” Buildings selected in conjunction with the Miami Design Preservation League will be featured in a unique walking guide that will complete the story of Deco out on the streets of South Beach, extending the show’s narrative and the style’s legacy into the now.

Key works of Deco include:

Photographic portfolios from the 1925 exposition showcasing the works of Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Le Corbusier, and Jean Dunand, among others, as well as guidebooks from the pavilions;

Glass objects by René Lalique—a French jewelry designer who became popular for his Art Nouveau wares but found his voice at the 1925 exposition—including vases, perfume bottles, and powder boxes illustrating his influences from nature;

A writing desk and chair designed by Kem Weber for the San Francisco residence of Mr. and Mrs. John W. Bissinger (1929), featuring his signature sage-green painted wood and bridging European and American Art Deco designs;

A bedroom suite by Donald Deskey for Estey Manufacturing Company (1930–35) that beautifully demonstrates how even simple wooden furniture of the time could be modernized;

Tropical Deco train interiors (1936–37) by Paul Cret for the Florida East Coast Railroad featuring tropical animals and his Cincinnati Union Terminal (1929–33) Streamline furnishings; and

Design drawings and objects by industrial designers such as Raymond Loewy, Walter von Nessen, John Vassos, Henry Dreyfuss, and Walter Dorwin Teague.

“As an institution, we’ve been waiting to present this story,” said Wolfsonian director Tim Rodgers. “Art Deco is such a natural topic for The Wolfsonian; it shapes the architecture of our neighborhood, which attracts sightseers and admirers from across the globe every year. Though we are known for many iconic Art Deco pieces—like our lobby fountain, originally part of the façade of the Norris Theatre—our collection holds far more riches, and we’re excited to finally bring many of these out for public view.”

The Wolfsonian Announces its First Major Art Deco Exhibition The Wolfsonian-FIU Museum, which has an extensive Art Deco collection has announced something everybody probably assumed it did years ago, its first-ever major Art Deco exhibition.

#architectural history #Architecture #Art #art deco #exhibitions #interior design #museums #Wolfsonian Museum

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mainefromabove · 4 years ago

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Liberty Ship Memorial - Maine From Not Above

Maine. No longer from above, rather from the ground. My wings have been clipped, perhaps like Icarus I flew too close to the sun and got burned. Rather, more likely, it was Aeolus, whose strong winds signal the onset of Spring, who has betrayed and left me to view Maine from the ground. Now I am just like all the other photographers and bloggers trying to capture Maine’s history from a (no longer unique) angle. Well, what am I going to do, cry about it? No, I already did that earlier. My tears soaked the beautiful green grass as I walked from the Bug Light across back to our car. Then, I realized, another interesting historical site was appearing before my eyes. A large ships hull rises from the grass and pavement. Its cool steel exterior is partially opened on three sides, gently beckoning the young student-of-history within. Like a beached whale, this ship sits not upon the water but the land. I enter into (pass the threshold?) of this semi-interior / semi-exterior beast. There I am greeted by signage replete, a wealth of colour and information which quickly occupies my mind. Curiosity overwrites those feelings of sadness held so recently for my new Ostrich-like state.

Where I have found myself is the Liberty Ship Memorial. If you find yourself at Bug Light Park, I heavily encourage you to take a break from the wind messing up your hair and find respite and education in this monument/memorial. The land that you stand on in Bug Light Park used to be water. So is the place you are standing now. During World War II this entire area behind the breakwater was once an immense 140-acre shipyard that churned out hundreds of cargo vessel for the Allied cause in World War II. 236 of these 266 vessels were Liberty Ships, which is the name derivation of this memorial. The war effort as we know raged not only on the front lines in the European and Pacific Theatres, but also here at home as men and very importantly women reported for a variety of labour jobs to support the war effort in whatever way they could. The Todd-Bath Shipyard was constructed in 1941 and need for 10,000 workers was estimated. Turns out they needed closer to 15,000. Over the course of the war 80,000 joined the workforce for shorter and longer periods at the South Portland shipyards. Women played a huge part of this and other manufacturing jobs during the war effort. Rosie the Riveter’s allegorical cousin in the shipyards was Wendy the Welder. Thousands of “Wendy’s” did their part contributing to the war effort in this very shipyard.

The Liberty ships these workers made were sometimes referred to as “The Ugly Ducklings” of the US fleet. These massive ships were utilitarian, cost-effective, and could hold a massive amount of cargo. The US built over 2,700 Libertys over the course of the war, more than any other single design type in the history of shipbuilding. Their overall length was 441’ 6”, to put that in perspective think 1.5 football fields. A typical Liberty crew consisted of 44 merchant mariners and 12 Naval gun crew. Armament varied by mission but typically a 3” gun to the fore, 5” gun to the aft, and 2-8 20mm anti-aircraft guns spread elsewhere along the ship.

The signs were so informative (they are the source of all the above specified information) that I barely needed to do any internet research to gain a great deal of appreciation for this monument as well as the men and women who worked and produced so much to help with the war effort. However, to gain a little extra appreciation for the memorial itself, I trotted over to the Historical Marker Database to learn more about the half-ship that I was standing within. Ed Langlois was a key figure in the creation of this memorial. He himself was a shipyard worker and fought to preserve and honour the memory of his fellow workers and their efforts here in South Portland. As the country had no use for the shipyards post-WWII, the memory of them might have been relegated to the history books without this beautiful installation of public history.

Extensive research was required to create a sculpture that would accurately reproduce what a Liberty ship would’ve looked like in the drydock. A design team traveled from San Francisco to Toledo and back to be able to capture enough measurements, photographs, and data for the Liberty Ship Memorial’s designer, Renneth and Woodwarth. “With its exposed frames and partial exterior plating, the sculpture conveys the ship's scale, lines, and construction details. It also illustrates the utilization of pre-assembled parts that allowed Liberty Ships to be constructed so quickly. Details such as the size and spacing of the frames, height of the deck, welded plates, position of the gun turret, and color of the paint are among the many elements that remain true to the original Liberty's construction. The ships were launched from the shipbuilding basins with their bows out, and so the Memorial is oriented facing the bay. Aptly, the bow of the sculpture forms a chapel-like enclosure for viewing and reflection.”[1] An incredible deal of thought, planning, and execution went into preserving the history of this place and honouring the labour and sacrifices that went into ensuring this chapter in Maine history would live on for future generations to memorialize.

Alas, how I longed to be able to see what it looks like from above! Until then, enjoy these pictures of Maine from the ground and take some time to visit this site when you can and read all the wonderful signs and placards. There is a LOT of information to learn about these ships, the people that built them, and what that meant for the Allied war effort. I suppose the quantity of information and my flight-grounded status will just be one more reason to return to this park and these two beautiful pieces of Maine history on a windless summer day. For “once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”

[2]

[1] https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=50474

[2] https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/08/the-famous-quote-that-da-vinci-never-said/

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tigerstrikesasteroidnetwork · 4 years ago

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NY / Paper Trails

Left: Kyoko Hamaguchi, Postal Summary (9505 5143 5727 8320 1732 96), 2018, shipping box, photo emulsion Right: tamara suarez porras, as two bodies near in a field of stars, 2020, silver gelatin print

Paper Trails April 10 – May 9, 2021 The gallery will be open every Sat & Sun from 3 – 6pm and by appointment

Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to present Paper Trails, a two-person exhibition curated by Yael Eban featuring the work of Kyoko Hamaguchi and tamara suarez porras. Both artists incorporate rigorous analog darkroom processes in unconventional and dynamic ways, resulting in photographic objects that are both visually striking and conceptually lyrical.

In “Postal Summary,” Kyoko Hamaguchi transforms the delivery system into a process for photographic image making. She gets a shipping box at a post office, makes a pinhole in one of its sides, coats the inside with photo emulsion so that its surface becomes photosensitive, and ships it to herself. While moving through the postal system, the box covertly records the shipment process on its photosensitive interior. Once Hamaguchi receives the box, she soaks it in chemicals to develop the image. During this process, the box becomes distressed and the shape distorted. The resulting image shows several spaces superimposed on top of each other, accentuated by the crisscrossing of fluorescent ceiling lights in a phenomenon akin to abstract painting. Each box produces a unique image dependent on where and for how long the box sat in various stops during its shipment. The box itself functions as both photograph and camera.

For this exhibition at TSA NY, Hamaguchi will also create a site-specific piece called “Space Watcher,” a pinhole camera made of drywall—the same material most walls are made from today. The piece takes the shape of the corner of a room and is coated inside with photo emulsion. She sets the camera in the corner of the room to record the duration of an event that happens in the space. After finishing the recording, she develops the entire structure as a photograph. The room is directly recorded onto the camera, appearing as a cube projected onto the interior of a triangular pyramid. Moving forms blur or disappear entirely. This work is installed as a camera that records the duration of the exhibition.

In “that which we cannot ever expect to see” tamara suarez porras creates a series of poetic assemblages that consider photography's relationship to the universe. She explores the poetic possibilities of scientific and vernacular archives when decoupled from original context and rearranged. Source material for the photographs and titles range from images and text collected from magazines, books, and other instructional or scientific texts. With visible tears and folds, the images meditate on the impossible physical relationship to galactic bodies of unfathomable scale and at impossible distances, yet able to be held by the hand through the photographic object. This impossibly hands-on relationship to the cosmos is underscored by the works being printed in the black-and-white darkroom. The ubiquity of these photographs across mass media and educational materials develops a set of (false) memories of sites and forms that we cannot ever expect to see in any way other than through an image. A line from Chris Marker’s "Sans Soleil" is a touchstone: “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.” What does it mean to remember, to know something never encountered with our bodies? How might we get closer to knowing the unknowable? Each print begins with the arrangement of vernacular images of photographic processes and the cosmos collected from magazines, books, and scientific texts, then printed in the darkroom with digital negatives.

Kyoko Hamaguchi, born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, is a conceptual mixed-media artist who lives and works in New York City. By utilizing her daily experiences and communication systems and tools in society, she is constantly searching for ways to invent transient images and shapes to reflect her ever-shifting perspective as an immigrant. Her practice takes form in many different media including photography, sculpture, and installation. She holds an MFA from Hunter College in New York (2020) and a BFA from Tokyo University of the Arts (2015). She has shown in numerous group exhibitions in New York and Japan including at WhiteBox, New York; SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018, 2019, and 2020, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan; and Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo. She had her first solo exhibition at KOKI ARTS, Tokyo in 2020 and is having her second at ATM Gallery, New York in April 2021.

tamara suarez porras is an artist, writer, and educator from (south) Brooklyn, NY and based in the Bay Area. Her work examines experiences of knowing, remembering, and forgetting. From within vernacular archives, she considers how photographic imagery is used to know the unknowable. She has exhibited nationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, School at the ICP, En Foco Touring Gallery, and Deitch Projects in New York City, as well as fusedspace, Root Division, The Growlery, and Embark Gallery in San Francisco. tamara teaches at the University of San Francisco and California College of the Arts. She is a graduate of NYU’s Photography+Imaging department and from California College of the Arts in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies.

photos by Yael Eban

#papertrails #tigerstrikesasteroid #tiger strikes asteroid

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rocklandhistoryblog · 4 years ago

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FLASHBACK FRIDAY – NEWS FROM YESTERYEAR

HENRY VARNUM POOR DIES

Excerpt from the Journal News December 9, 1970 #50Years Ago

HENRY VARNUM POOR DIES

Henry Varnum Poor, 82, eminent American artist, died yesterday at his home in New City. One of the original coterie of artists and writers who settled on South Mountain Road shortly after World War I, he had been a resident of the county for 50 years.

Mr. Poor was equally famed as a painter, potter, and a designer of homes. “A jack-of-all-trades” is how the artist, a member of the National Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, used to describe himself.

He said he had taught himself potting to make a living. He came to design homes for others because of his success in designing and building his own.

Mr. Poor was born in Chapman, Kan., in 1888. His family came originally from Andover, Me., where Mr. Poor’s grandfather had a mill and was a blacksmith.

Mr. Poor graduated from Stanford University as a Phi Beta Kappa and a four-letter-man in athletics. His training in art was at Stanford, where he later returned to teach, at the Slade School in London and at the Academie Julien in Paris.

He was a veteran of both World Wars. During World War I, as a member of the AEF, he saw service at the French front and was at St. Mihiel when the armistice was signed.

Mr. Poor was chief of the Army’s art unit for the Alaskan Theater, with the rank of major during World War II. He later wrote and illustrated the “Artist Sees Alaska,” a book about his experiences.

After World War I he lived for a time in San Francisco, where he was one of the founders of the California School of Fine Arts.

He moved to Rockland County in 1920, when he and the late Shakespearean actor-Rollo Peters, bought some 40 acres of land. It was then he built his house from red sandstone, which he himself quarried and hauled from his own pit, and from sturdy chestnut trees he felled and hewed in the front yard.

Mr. Poor later designed homes for Maxwell Anderson, Milton Caniff, John Housman, and Burgess Meredith. He designed many others, the most recent for the manufacturer, Jules Billig.

Lucie Glenn, in an article in The Journal-News two years ago, said the houses seemed to be bred from the land around them and described them as “timeless houses so reminiscent of provincial French chateaux.”

At least one room for each house he designed had a curved outside wall and each had a curving turret staircase, giving the illusion of no support. Mr. Poor told Mrs. Glenn they were inspired by stairways in the Louvre and in old castles. His signature throughout the houses was in ceramic murals and tiles.

The houses were as much collectors’ pieces as Mr. Poor’s paintings and ceramics, which won him steady acclaim, awards and commissions from museums and private connoisseurs from all over the world.

During the Roosevelt era, Mr. Poor painted 12 murals in fresco for the Department of Justice building in Washington and a large mural, “Conservation of American Wildlife,” for the Department of the Interior building.

He painted murals for the rotundas of the Pennsylvania State College administration building and the Louisville Courier-Journal building, and made ceramic murals for Mt. Sinai Hospital, New York, and Deerfield, Mass., Academy.

Mr. Poor’s paintings hang permanently in the country’s principal museums, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For his landscapes he often chose Rockland County scenes, such as “High Tor and Haverstraw,” “Spring at Grassy Point,” or a brooding grey “View Over Nyack . . . Winter.”

His first conspicuous success was as a ceramist in a showing held at the Montross Gallery in New York. The clay he used for his pottery and tiles he had found along the Hudson.

The book Mr. Poor wrote on pottery, “From Mud to Immortality,&rdquot; is considered a definitive work on the subject.

In the foreword, he said it was in the self-taught tradition that he started “and have now for 36 years continued in the making of pottery. But not as a spare time or casual avocation. From the beginning, it was a 12-hours-a-day job by which I earned my living to the complete exclusion, during the first ten years, of any serious painting. But not of drawing. I drew constantly the birds, beasts, flowers, fruits, all the things around me, and was constantly occupied with their adaptation to ceramic design.”

Mr. Poor was one of the founders and the president of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and a member of the Artists Equity Association. He had been a member of the Federal Commission on Fine Arts and an artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. He was one of the founders of the American Designers Gallery.

Mr. Poor is survived by his widow, Bessie Breuer, the novelist; two daughters, Anne K. Poor of New City, who is also noted as an artist, and Mrs. Josephine Hoagland of California; a son, Peter V. Poor, a television director and producer in New York, and six grandchildren.

Services will be held Friday at 11am. at the New City Methodist Church. The Rev. John Paul Griffith will officiate. Interment will be in Mt. Repose Cemetery, Haverstraw.

IMAGE: Henry Varnum Poor (1887-1970), portrait of an artist, very possibly a self portrait, oil on board, signed and dated '1944' L/L, titled verso 'The Painter in Tan Smock', 23 1/2" x 19 3/4", frame 30" x 26 1/2".

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This Week in Rockland (#FBF Flashback Friday) is prepared by Clare Sheridan on behalf of the Historical Society of Rockland County. To learn about the HSRC’s mission, upcoming events or programs, visit www.RocklandHistory.org or call (845) 634-9629.

#rockland history #local history #rockland county #rocklandhistory #nyshistory #nys history #Henry varnum Poor #south mountain road

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