The American Civil War: Through Artists’ Eyes through
July 5, 2015, The Toledo Museum of Art,
Galleries 28 &29 See a myriopticon,
stereoscopes, and hear music of the time such Farewell to the Star Spangled
Banner and the Star Spangled Banner with Brilliant Variations.
THE MYRIOPTICON
The deadliest war in
American history helped spark the career of one of the most important game
makers in the United States. Milton
Bradley, a Springfield, Massachusetts, draftsman, print-maker, and designer,
entered the game industry just before the Civil War with his popular The Checkered
Game of Life. After the war broke out,
he produced several card and trivia games for children as well as portable
versions of checkers and other games for soldiers. In 1866 he created The
Myriopticon: A Historical Panorama of
the Rebellion. Panoramas had
been popular in the United States since the late eighteenth-century, when
artists and promoters began offering travelogues to the Holy Land or down the
Mississippi through a series of paintings on a canvas hundreds of feet long and
several yards high that slowly scrolled from one reel to another. The Civil War inspired northern and southern entrepreneurs
to create panoramas with patriotic, technical-sounding names for exhibition to
audiences throughout the Union and Confederacy.
Northerners could see the “Grand Panorama of the War,” the “Polyrama of
the War,” “Norton’s Great Panorama of Recent Battles,” the “Diorama and
Polopticomarama of the War,” “The Mirror of the Rebellion,” and “A Cosmorama of
Battles of the Civil War.” Southerners could view Burton’s “Southern Moving
Dioramic Panorama,” “The Grand Panopticon Magicale of the War and Automaton
Dramatique,” and Lee Mallory’s “Pantechnoptemon.” A number of proprietors updated their
exhibitions with additional battle scenes as the war progressed. Most panoramas included a spoken narration,
while many were accompanied by music.
The score to Stanley & Conant’s “Polemorama” featured “the Rattle of
Musketry—the Booming of Cannon, mingled with the tumultuous noise of the deadly
conflict.” Life-sized or scale models of
soldiers and ships stood or lay before the moving pictures, theatrical explosions
and smoke raised the excitement level, and the strategic use of front- and
back-lighting could change scenes from night to day or from peaceful reveries
to violent confrontations before the audience’s eyes. Panoramas were just one part of the war culture
that emerged throughout the United States and Confederacy. A Massachusetts boy named Willie Kingsbury
created his own by coloring illustrations from Harper’s
Weekly and pasting them together. As he rolled the series of war scenes from
one wooden spool to another, he narrated the events they portrayed to young
neighbors and cousins. Although it did
not appear until after the war was over, the Myriopticon was part of
this integration of childhood and war.
THE STEREOSCOPE
Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 29,
1809. He graduated from Harvard
University at the age of 20, at which time he began writing poetry. He switched his professional focus from law
to medicine, and embarked upon a career as a professor and researcher at the
medical schools of Harvard and Dartmouth. In 1840, Dr. Holmes married Amelia Lee Jackson, a
Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice. The couple would later have two sons and a
daughter, with their eldest son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. becoming an
influential Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Dr. Holmes maintained that photography was a
transformative instrument that combined past memory with an appearance of
contemporary social reality. Intrigued
by Professor Charles Wheatstone's invention of the stereoscope (also known as
the English stereoscope), Dr. Holmes decided to construct his own variation in
1859. He discussed the trials and
tribulations of developing the hand or American stereoscope in his 1859 essay,
"The Stereoscope and the Stereograph." Dr. Holmes explained that he sought to create
a simple device that could produce complex results. The stereoscope needed two lenses and a
supporting frame. He also inserted slots
to hold the stereographs in place, and added a grooved, dovetailed stand.
http://historiccamera.com/cgi-bin/librarium2/pm.cgi?action=app_display&app=datasheet&app_id=2590
SEVENTEEN PROGRAMS accompany the exhibit including lectures, films, reenactments and
music. Find the schedule at http://www.toledomuseum.org/exhibitions/americancivilwar/
The word batik
originates from the Javanese tik and means to dot. To make a batik, selected areas of the cloth
are blocked out by brushing or drawing hot wax over them, and the cloth is then
dyed. The parts covered in wax resist
the dye and remain the original colour. This
process of waxing and dyeing can be repeated to create more elaborate and
colourful designs. After the final
dyeing the wax is removed and the cloth is ready for wearing or showing. http://www.batikguild.org.uk/whatisbatik.asp
Batik is a pure-Java library that can be used to render, generate, and
manipulate SVG graphics. (SVG
is an XML markup language for describing two-dimensional vector graphics.) IBM supported the project and
then donated the code to the Apache
Software Foundation, where other
companies and teams decided to join efforts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batik_%28software%29
Paraphrase from Pleading Guilty, a novel by Scott Turow He regarded agreement as a failure of his
obligation to exercise critical intelligence--instead there is probing
question, sly jest, a suggested alternative--a way for him to put an ax to your
tree. Excerpt of the Guardian's 2002 interview
with Scott Turow Q. Is the Kindle County of your books
Chicago? A. I got situated in Kindle County
by accident because when I started writing Presumed Innocent I was writing
about Boston. Eight years later so much
of Chicago had infiltrated this Boston-sized city that I had a kind of
imaginary place so I renamed it Kindle County.
Q. Is there a theme linking your
books? A. All my novels are about the ambiguities that
lie beneath the sharp edges of the law. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/nov/24/crime.saulbellow
"Rabbit
rabbit rabbit" is one variant of a common British superstition which states that a person should say or repeat the
word "rabbit" or "rabbits", or "white rabbits",
or some combination of these elements, out loud upon waking on the first day of
the month, because doing so will ensure good luck for the duration of that
month. Chapter 1 of the Trixie Belden story The
Mystery of the Emeralds (1962) is titled “Rabbit! Rabbit!”
and discusses the tradition: Trixie
Belden awoke slowly, with the sound of a summer rain beating against her
window. She half-opened her eyes,
stretched her arms above her head, and then, catching sight of a large sign
tied to the foot of her bed, yelled out, “Rabbit! Rabbit!” She bounced out of bed and ran out of her
room and down the hall. “I’ve finally done it!” she cried . . . Today it has spread to many English-speaking
countries and in the United States the tradition is particularly found in
northern New England although, like all folklore,
determining its exact area of distribution is difficult. The superstition may be related to the
broader belief in the rabbit or hare being a "lucky" animal, as
exhibited in the practice of carrying a rabbit's foot for
luck.
During the mid-1990s, U.S. children's cable channel Nickelodeon helped popularize the superstition in
the United States as part of its "Nick Days", where during commercial
breaks it would show an ad about the significance of the current date, whether
it be an actual holiday, a largely-uncelebrated unofficial holiday, or a
made-up day if nothing else is going on that specific day. (The latter would be identified as a
"Nickelodeon holiday".)
Nickelodeon would promote the last day of each month as "Rabbit
Rabbit Day" and to remind kids to say it the next day, unless the last day
of that specific month was an actual holiday, such as Halloween and New Year's Eve. This
practice stopped by the late 1990s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_rabbit_rabbit
Thank you, Muse reader!
Van Gogh stars
at Sotheby's big impressionist and modernist auction by Robin Pogrebin On Nov. 1, 1888, Vincent van Gogh set
up his easel in an ancient Roman necropolis in Arles, France, and painted an
avenue of stone sarcophagi lined by towering poplars aflame with the colours of
autumn. Known as L'allée Des Alyscamps, it
was the big seller at Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art evening sale on May
5, 2015, bringing $US66.3 million ($83.2 million) – when it had been
expected to fetch $US40 million – as five bidders competed for a prize that
ultimately went to an Asian private collector.
http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/arts-and-entertainment/art/van-gogh-stars-at-sothebys-big-impressionist-and-modernist-auction-20150506-ggvmyn
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1293
May 6, 2015 On this date in 1889,
the Eiffel Tower was officially opened to the public at
the Universal
Exposition in Paris. On this date in 1935, Executive Order 7034
created the Works
Progress Administration.
No comments:
Post a Comment