The Getty Villa

Posted on March 9, 2020 by admin

I’m connected on Facebook with a man named Rolf Achilles. I took a noncredit class he taught on Chicago history at the Newberry Library in the late 1980s. I think he also attended the Harvest Dinner Party at my apartment on October 22, 1988, but I’m not sure — a lot of people were there. Not sure I’ve seen him since then, or whether he’d remember me if he saw me.

Rolf’s an art historian, and often publishes images of fine art on Facebook. Not long ago, he posted pictures of items on display at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, California. I also happened to be planning my trip to California at the time. Almost at once I knew I wanted to see the place, along with the Getty Center. Thanks, Rolf.

When the time came, on the afternoon of February 23, I only had time for one of them. I decided on the Getty Villa. Of course I did. It offers a collection of ancient art.
Oil billionaire and notorious tightwad J. Paul Getty had the property developed in the 1970s to house his large collection of ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan art. Tight-fisted Getty might have been in many things, but not when it came to the sumptuous villa. The structure, on the hills overlooking the Pacific, is a re-creation of a specific villa in Herculaneum, the Villa of the Papyri, which wasn’t just any Roman country villa, but among the poshest known.

Apparently the old man died before the villa was completed, or at least he never went to see it. Too bad for him. The villa was opened to the public as a museum for a short time, but soon closed and wasn’t re-opened until 2006, after some additions to the grounds.

Langdon Wilson Architects did the original design. “Architects looked closely at the partial excavation of the Villa dei Papiri and at other ancient Roman houses in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae to influence the design,” the Getty web site says. “The scale, appearance, and some of the materials of the Getty Villa are taken from the Villa dei Papiri, as is the floor plan, though it is a mirror of the original.”

In 2006, Machado Silvetti renovated the villa and added a nearby complex of buildings, such as a cafe, museum store and auditorium. These buildings set the pattern for your approach to the Getty Villa. After parking at some distance, you walk to a bank of elevators or flight of stairs that take you to a elevated path to the villa. Then you have to go back down (part of the way) to enter the villa — via a 500-seat outdoor amphitheater, which was also part of the addition.

In this shot, the amphitheater is to the left, the entrance to the right.
The entrance. I decided to go in and look at the building and grounds first, and then the works of art on display.
The entrance leads to the Atrium, a splendid introduction to the structure that has rooms off each side, exhibiting art. Then the structure opens up into an open-air Inner Peristyle.

“This type of space was common in the second century B.C., when the main structure of the ancient villa was built,” signage in the peristyle says. “The Getty Villa’s garden is lushly planted with a variety of annuals and perennials bordered with hedges. The colonnade is paved the terrazzo, a mosaic flooring… A long, narrow pool emphasizes the east-west axis of the Getty Villa. Statues of young women, reproductions of ancient bronze sculptures found at the Villa dei Papiri, are set around the pool.”

Exit the Inner Peristyle and you’re on a small balcony overlooking to Outer Peristyle. I stood there for a while, just gawking. It’s a gawk-worthy place.
The top level of awe at the property, as far as I was concerned. The Atrium had been bronze and the Inner Peristyle had been silver. Now I was at the gold level.

Walk out into the Outer Peristyle and all the way to the far end, and you get a view of the Inner Peristyle that you came from.I quote at length a press release from the time the Getty Villa reopened in the mid-2000s that’s remarkably informative: “Designed by Denis L. Kurutz Associates, and implemented by kornrandolph, inc., the Getty Villa landscape takes into account the lush topography of the Malibu canyon.

“In addition to the historically accurate species found in the four gardens and in areas closest to the J. Paul Getty Museum building, the landscape design also features a mix of Mediterranean and native California varieties, local plants of the Santa Monica mountains, and plants from other parts of the world that grow in climates similar to that of Southern California.

“[The Outer Peristyle] is the Villa’s main garden, the largest and grandest of the four. Bronze sculpture and replicas of statues discovered at the remains of the first-century Villa dei Papiri have been placed in their ancient findspots…

“Just like its smaller neighbor, the Outer Peristyle is dominated by a large pool running down the center. Trimmed ivy topiaries frame the edges of the pool, which is crowned at its north end with two sculptural pomegranate trees and enclosed by 24 Grecian laurels on either side, mirroring the structural columns of the building.

“Four benches are available — two located in arbors draped in grape vines, and two nestled in pockets surrounded by hand-crafted wood trellises. Clusters of rose gardens are filled with ancient gallica, damask, and musk roses, while much of the ground is covered with a layer of sweet violet. Flowering perennials such as chamomile, daisy, rosemary, and sage are planted in abundance for variety and color, along with tulips, iris, Madonna lily, cyclamen, and narcissus.”

I understand that the Getty Villa isn’t an exact replica of the original in Herculaneum. For one thing, the Villa dei Papiri hasn’t been fully excavated. Also, buildings in our time need to be up to modern fire codes and so on. Still, as a re-creation of ancient Rome, this is likely to be the best I’ll ever see.

It’s also an excellent setting for the art collection. I’ve read that the once upon a time, Getty had some issues with stolen artwork. Or at least disputed provenance. Back around the time the villa re-opened, a number of objects were sent back to Italy and Greece. Hope that’s all behind the museum. What remains is amazing enough.

Might as well start with the museum’s star piece of art. Its Mona Lisa, you might say: the Lansdowne Hercules, Roman, ca. AD 125. (As the museum styles it — not CE.)
Found near Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, so maybe the emperor himself saw it. In our time, the statue has its own room in the Getty Villa.

Other Roman statues include Leda and the Swan, AD 1st century.
Venus, Roman, AD 2nd century.
Crouching Venus, Roman, AD 100-150
Jupiter, Roman, 1st century BC
Plus busts. A number of emperors. Such as Augustus.
Tiberius.
Caligula.
All very good, but I’ll never shake the feeling that those emperors looked like Brian Blessed, George Baker and John Hurt, respectively.

The Greek galleries excelled in pottery. All the pictured objects are Athenian, 6th or 5th century BC. Such as Storage Jar with Diomedes Slaying Rhesos.
Mixing Vessel with Adonis and Goddesses.
Prize Vessel with a Chariot Race
All in all, the ancient art collection is in the same league as those at the British Museum and the Pergamon Museum, in my amateur opinion, though I’ve barely scratched the surface of the many collections around the world.

Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Posted on March 8, 2020 by admin

With a name like Hollywood Forever Cemetery, I suspected — in spite of what I’d read — that the place had gotten the Hollywood treatment instead of a proper renovation. That is, superficial and unsatisfying.

Fortunately, I was wrong. Just off a dowdy selection of Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood Forever is a resplendent cemetery, on par with any of the lush rural-cemetery-movement grounds I’ve seen in other parts of the country.

With examples of funerary art.
A number of private mausoleums.
Including one picturesquely set on a small island, the tomb of William A. Clark Jr. (1877-1934), son of copper baron Sen. William A. Clark Sr.

Plenty of trees.
If you find just the right spot, you can see the Hollywood sign off in the distance.
There are a few unexpected features, such as a section devoted to Southeast Asian memorials.
I’ve also read that in our time, Russian immigrants are fond of the cemetery. There’s plenty of visible evidence of that.

Along with a sprinkling of earlier Russian émigrés.
Hollywood Forever also sports a number of unconventional memorials. Something you might expect in California, except that I’ve seen them elsewhere.
Or maybe not unconventional, but just a little unusual.

Plenty of regular folks, too. Most of the permanent population would be, I believe. John Taylor was laid to rest just as the movie business started getting off the ground in Hollywood.

The cemetery dates back to 1899 and has had three names: Hollywood Cemetery, Hollywood Memorial Park, and since 1998, Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Its history is as strange as Hollywood itself.

A long-time owner in the 20th century essentially used the place as a piggy bank, and let it go to pot by the 1990s. The current owner invested millions in the property’s renovation — or oversaw the investment, and I’ll say it again, did a splendid job — with the funds at least partly generated by a pre-need funeral company Ponzi scheme his father and brother went to prison for, though the owner himself wasn’t charged. Sounds like a subplot in the entertaining and California-esque Six Feet Under, except the con was perpetrated in Missouri.

The whole story is more than I care to unpack, but for further reading there’s “The Strange History of Hollywood Forever Cemetery,” an article about the Ponzi scheme, and this entertaining article in LA Weekly.

Not only has the current owner made the cemetery look good, he’s raised public awareness of it through various events, such as outdoor movie screenings and other events not usually associated with graveyards. Also — and perhaps most astute of all, from a business perspective — he seems to have opened up space to be interred, especially in mausoleums near famous people (example to follow).

That brings me to the fact that I’ve buried the lead (har, har). All the features I’ve mentioned above are nice, but not really why I spent a couple of hours at Hollywood Forever on a pleasantly warm Sunday morning.

I’d come to find the graves of movie stars. Normally, celebrity earns a shrug from me. But I was in Hollywood. Movie stars are part of its sense of place. It’s a movie industry town, after all. Besides, a highly detailed map of the cemetery is available at the front office for a reasonable $5, and it guides you to the graves of about 200 notables.

“We sell more of these maps than we do flowers,” the lady behind the counter told me.

So I was on a treasure hunt to find some stars that I’d heard of, especially from the Hollywood of before I was born, more or less. It was fun.

Grand names are part of the deal at Hollywood Forever. Parts of the cemetery include the Garden of Eternal Love, Chandler Gardens, Garden of Memory, and a Jewish section featuring the Plains of Abraham, Garden of Jerusalem and Garden of Moses. This is the the entrance is the Abbey of Psalms Mausoleum.
I entered in search of the Crying Indian, Iron Eyes Cody. I found him in a modest niche. His wife, who died about 20 years before he did, rests there as well. She’s called “Mrs. Iron Eyes Cody” on the plaque; you have to look her up to learn she had a name besides her Italian-American husband’s made-up Native American name. She was Bertha Parker Pallan and, unlike him, was actually an Indian.

Iron Eyes is small potatoes compared to the real star of the Abbey of Psalms: Judy Garland. She has her own chapel-like room, re-interred there only in 2017. That must have been quite a coup for Hollywood Forever.

Want to have your ashes near Judy? It can be arranged. A lot of new-looking, glass-door niches are in the chapel walls, most still empty, though I did note that John Cassese, the “Dance Doctor,” recently occupied an eye-level niche across from Judy. His niche includes an urn, but also a bobblehead-like figure of him, a printed obituary, an award he won in 2013, a small disco ball, some seashells and other objects.

From there I headed to the open air, looking for Mel Blanc.
I left a penny. Here was a man who had entertained me and millions of others.

Most of the graves I wanted to see were in the Garden of Legends, an open area, and the Cathedral Mausoleum, so I soon headed that way. Douglas Fairbanks and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. have their own lawn and reflecting pool, with a major memorial next to the Cathedral Mausoleum.

The cemetery shop only had a few postcards for sale, but they included ones featuring Douglas Fairbanks, probably dressed for The Black Pirate and looking very much like the actor who invented swash and buckle. I sent one of them to a friend of mine and wrote, “You or I might be cool, but we’ll never be Douglas Fairbanks cool.”

Heading into the Garden of Legends, I soon happened across Johnny Ramone. I didn’t even know he was dead.
Nearby is a cenotaph for Hattie McDaniel, who was denied burial here in 1952 because of segregation. Her memorial was erected in 1999.

Next I spent a while looking for Fay Wray, and found her, and then Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The composer is buried under a tree.
I sent the picture to my old friend Kevin, a movie music enthusiast. But for Kevin I might not know about Korngold, or have ever listened to such treasures as the music from The Adventures of Robin Hood or The Sea Hawk.

Rounding the pond that forms the centerpiece of Garden of Legends, I came across Cecil B. DeMille.
One I hadn’t been looking for: Virginia Rappe.
I puzzled for a moment. Who was that? Then I remembered.

Tyrone Power is hard to miss.
Next to him is Marion Davies’ mausoleum, which you might miss if you don’t know that her actual name was Douras, which is above the entrance. She paid for the building herself, I’ve read.
At the Cathedral Mausoleum, an even larger complex than the Abbey of Psalms Mausoleum, I found Peter Lorre in a niche. I was looking for him. I also found Mickey Rooney. I wasn’t looking for him, but he does illustrate that stars are once again considering the cemetery, now that the period of neglect is over.

Rooney’s inscription says: “One of the greatest entertainers the world has ever known. Hollywood will always be his home.”

Well, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, Mickey, though I want to mock that inscription. Then I began noticing some other recent arrivals from the movie business, most of whom I’d never heard of. Some of the memorials were like ads in Variety, touting their careers.

Last stop: Valentino. I couldn’t very well miss him.
I’d read that lipstick is often there, and so it was. He’s got amazing staying power for a silent film star.

Curious, I took note of the grave next to Valentino: June Mathis Balboni (d. 1927). Just an accident that this person is next to the Great Lover?

No. She knew him. In fact, she discovered Valentino and wrote some of his movies, most notably The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Remarkable the tales that cemeteries tell.

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels &c

Posted on March 4, 2020 by admin

Another place that still under construction the last time I visited Los Angeles, in 2001: the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the seat of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles.

The 1994 Northridge earthquake so badly damaged the previous seat, the 1870s Cathedral of Saint Vibiana, that the archdiocese wanted to tear it down and build another cathedral on the site. Preservationists, led by the Los Angeles Conservancy, fought against that, and so eventually a deal was struck allowing the city to take possession of the former cathedral, and the archdiocese to build a new building on downtown land given to it by the city.

These days the former cathedral is an event center — which I didn’t see — and the new cathedral, completed in 2002, looks like this.Not everyone loves the design by Rafael Moneo, which I’ve seen called deconstructivist or postmodern, but which looks pretty brutal to me. I wasn’t all that fond of it myself, though it is interesting.

Does it say sacred space to me? Not particularly. You could argue that most of us have been conditioned by traditional forms to feel that way. Or you could argue that of course sacred space should be beautiful, not brutal. Take your pick. My goal when I’m somewhere is to see what’s there.

Besides, the interior is less brutal somehow.
The light fixtures and the natural light help soften the space, I think. Also note that people use the space. While I lurked around the back of the cathedral, a couple named George and Florence were getting married up front. People probably get married there every Saturday except during lent.

At the back is the Ezcaray Reredos, an intricate work of carved black walnut.
It dates from 17th-century Spain. More information about how it came to be in modern California is here, though I will say it left Spain during an impoverished period in the 20th century. The sign in front of the reredos is incorrect, however, when it says that the chapel attached to Saint Philip Neri at Ezcaray, original home of the work, “was dismantled in 1925 after being damaged in the Spanish Civil War…”

On the cathedral’s lower level is a mausoleum.
Most of the spaces are yet to be occupied. I later read that Gregory Peck is interred there, but I didn’t see him. I did spot California Chief Justice Malcom Millar Lucas (d. 2016), who had the distinction earlier in his judicial career of presiding over the trial of Charles Manson.

The relics of Saint Vibiana are in the mausoleum as well. She was a 3rd-century martyr.
Atlas Obscura: “Her time in the public eye began in 1853 when her tomb was excavated from the catacombs of San Sisto in Rome. Unlike many of the so-called ‘catacomb saints’ who didn’t even have names, the inscription on Vibiana’s tomb gave her name, the day of her death (August 31), the symbolic laurel wreath of martyrdom, and indicated she was ‘innocent and pure.’

“The following year Bl. Pope Pius IX gave her relics — blood, tomb inscription, and body — to Thaddeus Amat, the newly appointed Bishop of Monterrey, California….”

After a time in Santa Barbara, and then many years at the former cathedral in Los Angeles, Vibiana eventually came to where she is now. Interesting that a saint migrated to California like everyone else.

The cathedral isn’t the only church I managed to visit in Los Angeles. Not far away is Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church, an historic parish church.
I rested a while inside. The name really should be rendered as La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, since all of its masses are in Spanish. The historic marker outside, in English and Spanish, says (in English) that the church “was dedicated on December 8, 1822 during California’s Mexican era. Originally known as La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles, the church was the only Catholic church for the pueblo. Today it primarily serves the Hispanic population of Los Angeles.”

On Sunday morning, as I headed through Koreatown, I spotted St. James’ Episcopal Church, or St. James’ in-the-City, on Wilshire Blvd.
I attended part of the service that was going on at the time. The church dates from the 1920s, done in a more traditional Gothic Revival by a San Francisco architect, Benjamin McDougall. Most notable about the design: a lot of fine stained glass.

Immanuel Presbyterian Church isn’t far away on Wilshire Blvd.
Unlike St. James’, it wasn’t open when I came by. Still, I got a good look from the across the street.

Downtown LA Walkabout, Including a Light Brush with Insane Clown Posse

Posted on March 2, 2020 by admin

Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles looks like a pleasant public space, but on the morning of February 22, I only got the barest glimpse. Entry to the park had been blocked all the way around by temporary barricades. This was a concern, since according to the receipt for the walking tour of downtown LA that I’d booked for that morning, the group was supposed to meet at Pershing Square.

Soon I found that we were meeting at the corner of W. 6th St. and S. Olive St., at the edge of the park, with the tour proceeding from there. I wasn’t the only one who asked the guide what was going on at Pershing Square. Turns out the city had rented it for the weekend for a couple of Insane Clown Posse concerts, the second of which would be that evening. Sounded like a must-miss to me.

The tour took us on foot past, and sometimes through, 12 different historic structures in downtown Los Angeles, beginning with the Millennium Biltmore Hotel. This is the central wing of the building.
Originally the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel when completed in 1923, the property has 683 rooms, down from about 1,500 at its opening. People didn’t mind smaller rooms in those days.

The south wing.
Design by Schultze & Weaver, a New York firm best known for the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, though that would come later.

The north wing. Why fly the Singapore flag, I don’t know. Owner Millennium & Copthorne Hotels plc is based in London.

Not far away is the CalEdison Building, one of LA’s grand art deco exercises, designed by Allison & Allison and finished in 1931.
The allegory above the entrance holds a torch. Not a torch of fire, but capped with a light bulb, though the electric utility that used to anchor the building left nearly 50 years ago.
The exterior is grand, but the main lobby is the real wow.
More CalEdison pictures are here.

Speaking of wow, the Los Angeles Central Library came a little further on the tour. Along with the U.S. and California flags flying there is the flag of the city of Los Angeles. The library is capped with an ornate pyramid. Originally it was supposed to be a dome, but 1920s Egyptmania had its influence on the building.

Completed in 1926 with a design by Bertram Goodhue and Carlton Winslow, what nearly happened to the library about 50 years later? Demolition. The Los Angeles Conservancy was organized at that time in response, and the building was saved.

Only to nearly burn down in April 1986. The cause remains a mystery. Our guide asked those of us old enough — which was most of the group — whether we remembered the fire. I drew a blank. Even living in Nashville at the time, I must have heard about it, but I couldn’t remember.

“It happened three days after the Chernobyl disaster, so it didn’t get as much coverage as it might have otherwise,” she said. Such is the news cycle.

The citizens of LA insisted that the library be rebuilt, and it was. Such places as the splendid central rotunda were thus saved again.

Looking up in the rotunda.
On the rotunda walls are fine California history murals, finished in 1933 by artist Dean Cornwell.

Across the street from the library are the Bunker Hill Steps, designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and completed in 1990.
If I knew downtown Los Angeles had a topographical feature called Bunker Hill, I’d forgotten it. The place has quite a history: a posh neighborhood in the late 19th century, a run-down one by the mid-20th century, and then the victim of urban renewal. These days, office towers and other commercial buildings developed during or after the 1980s occupy most of Bunker Hill.

Once you go up a hill, you have to go back down again, or at least we did to reach the next destinations on the tour. So we took Angels Flight Railway down the side of Bunker Hill. This is the terminal at the top.

The original funicular, which opened in 1901, closed in 1969, lost temporarily to urban renewal. The line was revived in 1996 a block south of the original location, though it has spent much of the last quarter-century closed because of safety problems. With any luck, those are resolved now.

Looking up the track, which is nearly 300 feet long.

The terminal at the bottom.
The last place on the tour: The Bradbury Building. I knew it by reputation. A lot of people know it that way. If it were in, say, Des Moines, that wouldn’t be true. But it’s in Los Angeles.
The exterior is nice, but it’s the striking interior that makes it a favorite of location scouts and tourists. An almost exact contemporary of the 1890s Monadnock Building in Chicago, the Bradbury’s superb ironwork reminded me of that building.
One George Wyman, a draftsman without formal architectural training, designed the building, at least according to most sources. He was inspired by the description of a building in Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy, again according to most sources. I like to believe the stories are true, since they argue against credentialism.

Back to Insane Clown Posse. I didn’t actually have a brush with them or any Juggalos closer than a few blocks away. That evening, as I headed for the Metro station to leave downtown, I heard the concert off in the distance. It was probably one of the opening acts, but no matter. I could hear that it was loud.

Winterlude ’20

Posted on February 19, 2020 by admin

Though it hasn’t been a harsh winter, it has been winter, so time for a short hiatus. Back posting around March 1.

It turned out to be a good idea to know as little as possible about Parasite before seeing that movie, which we did last weekend, weeks after we’d originally considered going. All that time, I did my best not to read about it. Not knowing the arc of the story helped maintain the suspense, which was as riveting as anything Hitchcock did, especially after the midway twist.

I did know that the movie came highly recommended, and by sources I respect more than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Could it, I wondered, be better than 1917? It was. That’s a remarkable achievement all by itself. One of those rare movies that is as good as people say.

I’ve updated my vanity North American map again.
The key to the colors is here. The color scheme is wholly idiosyncratic, so I do have certain ideas about certain places. For instance, if I spent some time in following places, I’d color the respective states blue: the Northwoods of Minnesota; Norfolk and vicinity in Virginia; Mobile, Alabama; and Tuscon, Arizona. If I spent a night in West Virginia or Delaware or Rhode Island or Manitoba, they’d be orange. Just means I need to get out more.

Though cold today, the sun was out. Time to take my new garden gnome outside.

Gnomish Stalin was a Christmas president from my brother Jay, shipped to me from the UK. Cornwall, specifically. For all I know, Cornwall might be the world hub of eccentric garden gnomes.
This year, I got Jay a Russian nesting doll — a political matryoshka doll, made in Russia. He sent me a picture. Nice set, though you’d think there would be room for Khrushchev at least, whom I’d pick for inclusion over Yeltsin.
Coincidence that we both sent Russian gifts — political Russian-themed gifts, no less? Or synchronicity? Who knows, I’m just glad to have a new conversation piece for my summertime visitors.

A Cartoon History of United States Foreign Policy Since World War I

Posted on February 12, 2020 by admin

Not long ago I looked up the Foreign Policy Association. Turns out the organization has a mission statement.

“The mission of the Foreign Policy Association today, as it has been for over 100 years, is to serve as a catalyst for developing awareness, understanding, and informed opinion on U.S. foreign policy and global issues. Through its balanced, nonpartisan programs and publications, the FPA encourages citizens to participate in the foreign policy process.”

By gar, that’s positively Wilsonian in its optimism that citizens can influence foreign policy, and that in fact U.S. foreign policy can be a force for good in this wicked world. Maybe it can. It’s certainly pretty to think so.

Another of the books I liberated from my mother’s house in recent years is A Cartoon History of United States Foreign Policy Since World War I — by the Editors of the Foreign Policy Association, the cover says, published in 1967. In the book’s acknowledgement, one Norman Jacobs is given as the editor of the association, but he thanks half a dozen people who participated. A group effort book, then.

The book includes about 250 editorial cartoons in 19 chapters. Actually, two examples are comic strips that editorialize, but they are exceptions, with most of the content one-panel cartoons. (Remarkably, included is a B.C. strip: two ants are watching two larger animals fight, and one ant says, “If we had ‘the bomb,’ we could intervene.”)

The editors provide a few lines of context for most of the cartoons, usually going out of their way to be nonpartisan and mostly nonjudgmental, at least as far as U.S. policy was concerned. For instance, before the U.S. entry into WWII, there are cartoons for and against intervention in European affairs and then the war itself.

The chapters, and the cartoons, are more-or-less chronological, beginning with the argument about U.S. participation in the League of Nations, continuing through the prewar years and the rise of fascism and then the U.S. in WWII. After that, as you’d expect, comes the Cold War and all its complications and players, which was ongoing as the book was published.

Lots of famous things are touched on — Munich, isolationism, Pearl Harbor, the atomic bomb, the founding of NATO, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, sputnik, the Berlin blockade and wall, and the Cuban missile crisis. Other less-remembered events were the subject of cartoons as well: the Washington disarmament conference, the sinking of the Panay, riots in Poznan, Poland, American marines landing in Lebanon in 1958, and so on.

I probably first read the book in junior high. I learned a great deal from it — maybe as much as in some of my classes — about the history referenced, but also a notion of how things considered settled now were once contentious.

One good example is the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO. Few would consider those mistakes now, or even 50 years ago, but in the late ’40s not everyone was on board, as illustrated by a cartoon that shows a man — labeled Our Global Meddlers — happily offering a diving board to a character called U.S. Senate. The board is labeled Atlantic Pact and it’s leading to shark-infested waters (labeled War Dangers).

I read through the book enough times over the years that many of the images are still familiar when I look them now. A Cartoon History of United States Foreign Policy Since World War I was also an introduction to some first-rate, or at least then-famous editorial cartoonists, and the art of such cartoons, which has been slipping away from us in recent decades.

The index is instructive. You can tell which cartoonists appeared the most in the book, such as John Fischetti (1916-80), Herblock (1909-2001), Bill Mauldin (1921-2003), Edmund Valtman (1914-2005) and Ralph Yardley (1878-1961). Other cartoonists rated a few examples, and many more only one. One editorial cartoonist not represented: Theodor Geisel, who had a lot to say.

Looking at it now, I’m interested to see the many ways the cartoonists used Uncle Sam. A quick glace has Uncle Sam as the bridegroom of Foreign Entanglements, surrounded by lions, one of the Wise Men, looking on as Europe burns, someone who’s tied cans to the tail of Hitler’s dog (it makes sense in context), as Gulliver tied down, a robbed man with empty pockets, a soldier in Korea, and many more.

Curiously enough, depictions of Uncle Sam seem to slack off in the late ’50s and early ’60s. More often presidents — Eisenhower, JFK and LBJ — stand in for their administrations in those years, though Wilson, FDR and Truman appeared often enough before then. Yet Uncle Sam isn’t completely gone, even in 1967: the second-to-last cartoon has Uncle Sam as a knight, riding (barely holding on to) a horse called U.S. Power. “Of course I’m in charge — I think,” he says (Bob Bastian, San Francisco Chronicle).

Plenty of non-American characters also appear, such as Hitler and Stalin, many times, but also Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain (but not, oddly, Churchill), Chiang Kai-Shek, Khrushchev (many times, but not Brezhnev — too new, I guess), Nasser, Mao, Charles de Gaulle and Fidel Castro, among others.

A few panels are outstanding examples of the editorial cartoon. One is “High Noon” by Bill Crawford (1913-82), which is exceptionally simple and effective. It depicts a top slice of a globe. Toward the bottom of the panel is an arrow on a rocket launcher, ready to fly; a world away, at the edge of the globe almost out of sight, is another arrow, the exact same one on an exact same launcher. The arrows are pointing at each other. This of course illustrates the height of the Cuban missile crisis.

One by C. D. Batchelor (1888-1977) from 1948 shows two figures heading up a luminous (golden) staircase, into heavenly clouds. They are holding hands. One figure is Czech Liberty. The other is Jan Masaryk.

An August 1945 cartoon by Daniel Fitzpatrick, “Journey’s End,” is also simple and effective. Small figures, looking much like the flagraisers on Iwo Jima, are on top of a globe raising a banner that says, VICTORY.

Finally, the two I consider the best in the book, and which were by the same cartoonist: Sir David Low (1891-1963), also known as the creator of Colonel Blimp. I believe both of the cartoons are also better known than the others in the book, and for good reason. Interestingly, neither are directly about U.S. foreign policy, just events that concerned the nation very much.

One is 1939’s “Rendezvous,” which has Hitler and Stalin politely bowing to each other over the body of Poland, whom they just murdered.

Hitler: “The scum of the Earth, I believe?”
Stalin: “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?”

The next year, after the fall of France, Low drew a tommy on a beach, invading airplanes overhead, waves crashing around. He holds a fist high. “Very well, alone” is the caption.

Both of these Low cartoons are here, along with a lot of other good ones he did.

The New Frontier Joke Book

Posted on February 10, 2020 by admin

Pick up a book like The New Frontier Joke Book and be reminded that humor doesn’t age well. With some exceptions, of course.

I picked up the paperback at my mother’s house some years ago and now it reposes on one of my bookcases. I assume my parents bought it new. That is to say, in 1963, which is the copyright date. Meaning that not long after it was published, sales fell as flat as Vaughn Meader’s career.

Still, enough copies must have sold to make the book a non-rarity on Amazon in our time. If you want one, you can get it for $2.30. The original price was 50 cents, or about $4.20 in current money.

Gene Wortsman was the author (aggregator, really). He was a newspaperman from Alabama, covering Washington for the Birmingham Post-Herald, which ultimately folded in 2005. Apparently he also wrote a book about Phenix City during the 1950s, which seems like a thing a newspaperman from the region would do, though Ray Jenkins of Columbus, Ga. (who died only last October), was better known for his coverage of Sin City, USA.

The promotional text on the back cover of The New Frontier Joke Book says, “Use this sparkling collection of the newest, brightest, and fanciest quips and cartoons about THAT FAMILY in the White House. Read it aloud, for the delight of your friends. Or save it for your private enjoyment — as a sure cure for the frustrations of thinking about the Cuban situation, income taxes, government spending, or any of the other joys of modern living.”

I thumb through it, looking for something that’s still funny. It isn’t easy. This was worth a chuckle:

“Son,” said a corpulent businessman, “it gives me a glow of pride to know you hate Kennedy the way I hated FDR.”

Other quips are mildly puzzling.

Thanks to Postmaster General Day, the nickel wins the award for the greatest comeback of the decade.

I assume that had something to do with an increase in the price of a first-class stamp.

These days, everyone in Washington wants to know if the President is off his rocker.

Ah, yes. The president was known to spend time in rocking chairs. (Which would account for the book’s cover art.) Bad back, you know. You can still buy one of the style he used for $549.

Some are Johnny Carson sorts of jokes, on his weaker nights.

Averell Harriman went on a mission to Moscow for FDR and a mission to India for JFK. That guy has more missions than the Salvation Army.

It isn’t true that JFK had a locksmith go through the White House and replace all of the Yale locks.

There are jokes about Jackie Kennedy’s wardrobe, the John-Bobby rivalry, the president’s relative youth, taxes, LBJ chaffing at the vice presidency, the size of the Kennedy family, Khrushchev, the space race, etc. etc.

Even one making fun of the Secretary of Agriculture.

So the Yankees are still winning baseball games. The only way to stop them is to put Orville Freeman in charge of their farm system.

Not a very good joke — I think, it’s a little hard to tell at this late date — but I suppose that was better for the secretary than being known for telling a remarkably crude joke.

More Skulls and Bones and Things

Posted on February 5, 2020 by admin

Here’s one reason the Field Museum might have jacked up its admission in recent years: it spent $8.3 million in 1997 to acquire the fossilized remains of the T. rex nicknamed Sue. Or at least part of that hefty figure, since other organizations, corporations and HNWIs also chipped in, I understand.

From 2000 to 2018, Sue stood in Stanley Field Hall. Mostly bones, but also a number of replacement replicas for a few missing ones. Even so, the museum and other sources call Sue the most complete T. rex ever discovered, at about 90 percent.

These days, Sue has her — his — gender actually uncertain, so its — own room in the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet, a multi-room exhibit about the evolution of life on Earth, complete with various fossils to illustrate various periods. Naturally, most of the crowds gravitate to the dinosaur bones, and not just Sue, but the creatures in the large Elizabeth Morse Genius Hall of Dinosaurs, which you reach before you get to the T. rex room.

Lots of impressive fossils there. Such as a triceratops. Can’t very well have a dinosaur collection without one of those.
Or an apatosaurus.
Or a stegosaurus.
Sue not only has its own room, there’s narration and a minor light show as the narrator describes different parts of the beast, the better for the audience to ooh and aah.
The head mounted on the rest of the skeleton is actually a replica. Sue’s head is kept in a separate box.
If I remember right, that’s the way it was when Sue was in Stanley Field Hall.

Sue isn’t the last of the fossil parade. Time marches on, a meteor kills the dinosaurs, and mammals increase in size. This fellow looks pretty large, even for a bear.
Known as Arctodus, or a short-face bear, it lived in Pleistocene North America but vanished about 11,600 years ago.

An Irish Elk.
How did they hold their heads up? Strong neck muscles, I guess. More subtle minds than mine have taken up that very question. Amusingly, Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “The Irish Elk, like the Holy Roman Empire, is misnamed in all its attributes: it is neither exclusively Irish nor an elk.”

A mastodon.
They are all examples of animals that didn’t survive the most recent Ice Age unless, as Gould mentions, Irish Elk survived into historic times. Just goes to show that no matter how tough you are, along comes a little climate change or hunters with pointy sticks and soon all that’s left is your bones, if that.

Field Museum ’20

Posted on February 4, 2020 by admin

Our main destination on Saturday was the Field Museum. Been awhile since we’ve been there. Looks as sturdy as ever.An important consideration was that the museum charges no admission for Illinois residents during the entire month of February, representing a $69 savings for us. A savings in theory, because it’s unlikely we would have ever paid full price. Maybe half that. I don’t have the numbers at handy, but I strongly suspect that ticket prices have significantly outpaced inflation over recent decades, and that sticks in my craw.
Not that you don’t get a high-quality natural history museum for that price.

Something I didn’t know before: the main hall, the grand, sweeping main hall of the Field Museum, which measures about 21,000 square feet, and whose ceiling reaches up 76 feet, actually has a formal name: Stanley Field Hall. He was Marshall Field’s nephew, but more than that, president of the museum for a long time, from 1908 to 1964.
T. rex Sue, the museum’s most famed — and marketed — artifact, isn’t in the hall any more. Those bones occupy their own room these days, more about which later.

Rather, an exhibit called Máximo now lords over the hall, at 122 feet across and 28 feet tall at the head. Not actual bones, but a model cast from a titanosaur discovered in Patagonia, and considered its own species, Patagotitan mayorum, only since 2018.

Still, it’s impressive.
After the main hall, we spent time at the Granger Hall of Gems, the Malott Hall of Jades and at a display of meteorites. Last time I visited the museum, we were promised that there would soon be a permanent exhibit of pieces of the Chelyabinsk Meteor, which fell to Earth in Russia in 2013.

Here they are.
Not that large, but I think every bit as interesting as the dinosaurs. I’ve always had more fondness for astronomy than paleontology.

Here’s something you don’t see every day, which is pretty much the reason you go to a place like the Field.
We’d happened onto an exhibit called Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman. It’s a remarkable group of sculptures.

“In the early 1930s, the Field Museum commissioned sculptor Malvina Hoffman to create bronze sculptures for an exhibition called The Races of Mankind,” the museum says. “Hoffman, who trained under Auguste Rodin, traveled to many parts of the world for an up-close look at the ‘racial types’ her sculptures were meant to portray.

“By the time the exhibition was deinstalled more than 30 years later, more than 10 million people had seen it — as well as its misguided message that human physical differences could be categorized into distinct ‘races.’

“Today, 50 of Hoffman’s sculptures are back on display — with a new narrative.”

Namely, that Hoffman did some remarkable sculptures of individuals, not illustrations of racial typologies. There’s some indication that Hoffman herself considered the whole typology idea as malarkey, even as she was creating the artwork.

“In her letters from the field, Hoffman told museum curators that she wanted to illustrate the dignity and individuality of each of her subjects,” the museum says.

“The Looking at Ourselves exhibition team believed that naming Hoffman’s previously unnamed subjects was an important way of illustrating that individuality. They spent months poring over Hoffman’s and her husband’s letters and journals, and consulting the work of others who have researched the Hoffman collection over the years, to find the subjects’ given names.

“For subjects whose specific identities remain unknown, the team worked with anthropologists to correctly pinpoint the names of their ethnic groups.”

The figure above, climbing a tree, is a Tamil man from southeast India, identity unknown. This is a Nuer man from Sudan, also unknown.
A group from various parts of Indonesia, put together by the artist. The two standing figures were modeled on Ni Polog and I Regog, a sister and brother from Bali. The others are a man from Madura and one from Borneo, identities unknown.
A Hawaiian: Sargent Kahanamoku, an aquatic athlete and member of a well-known Hawaiian family.
Glad we got to see Hoffman’s work. Ann and I spent a fair amount of time looking at them and discussing them. An idea for those who would destroy discredited statues: re-contexturalize instead.

Egyptian 25-Piastre Note

Posted on January 30, 2020 by admin

Something I didn’t know until yesterday, but might have guessed: the modern Egyptian pound, which is every bit as fiat-y as any other currency now, owes its origin to the Maria Theresa thaler, a good example of sound money if there ever was one. The history of money, especially currency, continues to fascinate. People will miss it if it all ever becomes nothing but notions on some server farm.

I don’t have a one-pound Egyptian banknote. I do have a 25-piastre note, the smallest paper denomination that the Central Bank of Egypt issues, acquired a few years ago with a number of other world banknotes for a small sum.

These days, 1 Egyptian pound = about 6.3 U.S. cents, so my quarter-pound note is theoretically worth about 1.5 cents. No collector value, I’m sure. The note has been issued since the 1980s, and I’ll bet there are a lot of them.
I’m not actually sure that’s the obverse, though Wiki says it is. I suppose the Arabic text determines that; the Roman text is on the other side. In any case, this side depicts the Sayeda Aisha Mosque in Cairo.

The Egyptian Coat of Arms is on the other side.
Not just any eagle, either: the Eagle of Saladin. The 12th-century Sultan of Egypt and warrior against the Crusader states.

Interesting choice of crops to flank the Eagle of Saladin. Wheat, of course; Egypt was the breadbasket of ancient Rome, one reason a prefect ruled the province directly on behalf of the Emperor, rather than a governor appointed by the Senate. Also, cotton. Certainly — Egyptian cotton, known the world over.

Corn? As in, maize? That’s what it looks like. The FAO tells me that in Egypt, “Wheat is the major winter cereal grain crop and the third major crop in terms of area planted… Maize is the second most important crop… but at least 50 percent of its production is used for livestock and poultry feed.”

How about that. Another consequence of the Columbian exchange echoing down the centuries.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: History