Search Results for: new york

Slippery

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Image: Flickr

Andy Warhol made a significant statement with Brillo Boxes, first exhibited at New York’s Stable Gallery in 1964. The banal collection of soap boxes seemed indistinguishable from those found at any supermarket. Warhol seemed to be saying that it’s not the visual appeal of an object that determines its status as art; rather, it’s the artist’s intention, his decision to regard an object as art, that confers that status. But this creates some puzzles:

For one, ironically, the original Brillo packaging had itself been designed by an abstract expressionist, James Harvey, who had been driven into commercial art to make a living. Arthur Danto writes, “The question was why Warhol’s boxes should have been worth $200 when that man’s products were not worth a dime.” Does Warhol’s stance mean that concepts entirely trump beauty, that one should properly judge an artwork by what it means rather than how it looks?

If so, is this art?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sixteen-miles/4772558547/
Image: Flickr

It’s not Warhol, but “Not Warhol,” by artist Mike Bidlo, displayed in the northeast corner of the lobby at New York’s Lever House in 2010. If Warhol can co-opt Harvey, can Bidlo co-opt Warhol? Why not? “At the time that they were shown, the Brillo Boxes were underappreciated,” Bidlo told the New York Times. “This is a different context and a different audience, but it’s a great opportunity for so many people to see them.”

Where does this end? Museum director Pontus Hultén claimed he’d created more than 100 wooden Brillo boxes in 1968 “according to Andy Warhol’s instructions,” but in 2010 the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board determined that “there is no known documentation that Warhol authorised their production.” What then is the status of these boxes? If art is in the mind of the creator, how do we resolve a dispute as to the contents of the creator’s mind? By committee?

| Art

The Taft Diet

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whtaft.jpeg

William Howard Taft weighed as much as 340 pounds during his presidency, but after leaving office he lost 70 pounds and kept it off for the remainder of his life. He shared his diet on the front page of the New York Times:

“I have dropped potatoes entirely from my bill of fare, and also bread in all forms. Pork is also tabooed, as well as other meats in which there is a large percentage of fat. All vegetables except potatoes are permitted, and of meats, that of all fowls is permitted. In the fish line I abstain from salmon and bluefish, which are the fat members of the fish family. I am also careful not to drink more than two glasses of water at each meal. I abstain from wines and liquors of all kinds, as well as tobacco in every form.”

“I can truthfully say that I never felt any younger in all my life,” he said. “Too much flesh is bad for any man.”

| History

Podcast Episode 1: Calendar Reform, Doll Mansions, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo

Today we’re launching a weekly podcast, on which we’ll answer listener questions, discuss recent popular posts on Futility Closet, share readers’ contributions on previous topics, present intriguing leads that we’ve encountered in our research, and offer a challenge in which listeners can match their wits.

Futility Closet podcast logo

Will New Year’s Day fall on a weekend in the year 2063? If calendar reformer Moses Cotsworth had succeeded, anyone in the world could have answered that question instantly — any of us could name the day of the week on which any future date would fall, no matter how distant. In this first episode we examine Cotsworth’s plan and similar efforts to improve our clocks and calendars.

We also look at how an antique dollhouse offers a surprising window into 17th-century Dutch history, explore a curious puzzle in an Alfred Hitchcock film, and invite you to participate in the first Futility Closet Challenge.

See full show notes …

| Podcast

Breakdown

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charlie_Parker,_Tommy_Potter,_Miles_Davis,_Duke_Jordan,_Max_Roach_%28Gottlieb_06851%29.jpg

When Charlie Parker’s 2-year-old daughter Pree died of pneumonia on March 6, 1954, he was in Los Angeles fulfilling a week-long engagement at the Tiffany Club. His wife, Chan, sent a wire from New York to let him know that they had lost her, and received four telegrams in reply:

4:11 a.m.:

MY DARLING MY DAUGHTER’S DEATH SURPRISED ME MORE THAN IT DID YOU DON’T FULFILL FUNERAL PROCEEDINGS UNTIL I GET THERE I SHALL BE THE FIRST ONE TO WALK INTO OUR CHAPEL FORGIVE ME FOR NOT BEING THERE WITH YOU WHILE YOU ARE AT THE HOSPITAL YOURS MOST SINCERELY YOUR HUSBAND CHARLIE PARKER.

4:13 a.m.:

MY DARLING FOR GOD’S SAKE HOLD ON TO YOURSELF
CHAS PARKER

4:15 a.m.:

CHAN, HELP
CHARLIE PARKER

7:58 a.m.:

MY DAUGHTER IS DEAD. I KNOW IT. I WILL BE THERE AS QUICK AS I CAN. MY NAME IS BIRD. IT IS VERY NICE TO BE OUT HERE. PEOPLE HAVE BEEN VERY NICE TO ME OUT HERE. I AM COMING IN RIGHT AWAY TAKE IT EASY. LET ME BE THE FIRST ONE TO APPROACH YOU. I AM YOUR HUSBAND. SINCERELY, CHARLIE PARKER.

He never forgave himself for being absent during Pree’s death. “Bird detached from things to save himself, which meant that in a way the sadness between them was very powerful,” recalled his stepdaughter, Kim. “I’ve seen very sad photographs of them … shortly after Pree’s death, and there’s just a complete space between them, and I think it was just the beginning of the end, really.” A year later he too was dead.

| Death

A Tall Tail

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Halley%27s_Comet_-_May_29_1910.jpg

As skywatchers prepared for the return of Halley’s comet in 1910, their excitement turned to trepidation when astronomer Camille Flammarion warned that cyanogen gas in the comet’s tail could poison the atmosphere. The New York Times reported growing alarm among astronomers and warned, “Prof. Flammarion is of the opinion that the cyanogen gas would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet.” The Washington Post quoted astronomer Henri Deslandres that the comet might cause torrential rains; his colleague D.J. McAdam warned that “Disease and death have frequently been ascribed to the admixture of cometary gases with the air.”

As the fateful date approached, an ad appeared in a South African newspaper: “Gentleman having secured several cylinders of oxygen and having bricked up a capacious room wishes to meet others who would share the expense for Wednesday night. Numbers strictly limited.” In Texas, salesmen went door to door selling “comet pills” and leather inhalers. In Germany, anxious residents began wearing comet hats and carrying comet umbrellas.

On the evening of May 18, as Earth passed into the comet’s tail, hundreds marched in a candlelight parade in San Juan, and prayer vigils were held in St. Petersburg churches and on the hilltops around Mexico City. In Lexington, Ky., excited citizens held all-night services, “praying and singing to prepare … [to] meet their doom.”

Nothing happened. Well, nearly nothing: In Towaco, N.J., two men had offered to pay $10 for the best description of the event as viewed from Walkman Mountain. When the town’s weary residents returned from their vigil, they found their chicken coops empty.

| Society

The Long Way

On Sept. 19, 1927, a bedraggled woman arrived at a telegraph maintenance cabin in British Columbia. The operator, Bill Blackstock, fed her and asked where she was going. “Siberia,” she said.

Her name was Lillian Alling, and she had crossed the continent on foot since entering Canada at Niagara Falls the previous year. She said she had emigrated from Russia to New York City, where she had worked as a maid but found herself unhappy there. She had decided to return to Russia, but realized it would be impossible to save enough for a steamer ticket. After consulting a map of North America in a public library, she had resolved to walk home.

Fearing for her safety in the Yukon winter, Provincial Police constable George Wyman contrived to charge her with vagrancy. “I was so surprised to see that woman there,” he told journalist Donald Stainsby. “She was so scantily clad and had no firearms or anything to see her through that country. She was about five foot five and thin as a wisp. When I first saw her, she was wearing running shoes. She had a knapsack with a half-dozen sandwiches in it, some tea and some other odds and ends, a comb and personal effects, but no makeup. I had a time getting her name; she wasn’t going to say anything to anybody. But I finally got it, and when she said she was going to Siberia, I couldn’t say anything. I thought she was out of her mind.”

Alling was released from prison by early November and resumed her journey. She reached Nome in 1929 and headed west, having covered more than 6,000 miles in less than three years. Her trail disappears there, but there’s an intriguing postscript: When True West magazine published an article about Alling in 1972, an Arthur F. Elmore of Lincoln, Calif., wrote to say that a Russian friend of his had grown up across the Bering Strait from Wales, Alaska. In the autumn of 1930, while on an errand for his mother, he had noticed three officials questioning a woman accompanied by three Eskimos:

“He remembered the woman telling the officials she had come from America where she said she had been unable to make a living or make friends. … She said she had had to walk ‘a terrible long way because no one would lift as much as a finger to help me in any way because they didn’t want to — or couldn’t understand — my feelings. I tried to make friends at first, but everyone wanted no part of me — as a foreigner — and that so deeply hurt me I couldn’t bear it and so I began to walk. I knew it was far and it would be hard but I had to do it even if no one understood. And I did it!'”

(From Susan Smith-Josephy’s monograph Lillian Alling: The Journey Home, 2011.)

| Oddities

Dreamed Up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FictionalAgloeNewYork.PNG

In composing a state map of New York in the 1930s, the General Drafting Company wanted to be sure that competing mapmakers would not simply copy its work. So the company’s founder, Otto G. Lindberg, and his assistant, Ernest Alpers, scrambled their initials and placed the fictional town of Agloe at the intersection of two dirt roads in the Catskills north of Roscoe.

Several years later, they discovered Agloe on a Rand McNally map and confronted their competitor. But Rand was innocent: It had got the name from the county government, which had taken it from the Agloe General Store, which now occupied the intersection. The store had taken the name from a map by Esso, which had (apparently) copied it from Lindberg’s map. Agloe had somehow clambered from imagination into reality.

Similarly, in 2001 editors placed a fake word in the New Oxford American Dictionary as a trap for other lexicographers who might steal their material. Fittingly, the word was esquivalience, “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities; the shirking of duties.”

Sure enough, the word turned up at Dictionary.com (it’s since been taken down), citing Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary.

And as with Agloe, the invention has taken on a life of its own. NOAD editor Christine Lindberg, who coined esquivalience, told the Chicago Tribune that she finds herself using it regularly. “I especially like the critical, judgmental tone I can get out of it: ‘Those esquivalient little wretches.’ Sounds literate and nasty all in one breath. I like that.”

| Language · Oddities

Back from the Klondike

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Back_from_the_klondike.svg

Sam Loyd devised this puzzle in 1898. Begin at the heart in the center and move three squares in any of the eight directions, north, south, east, west, northeast, northwest, southeast, or southwest. You’ll land on a number; take this as the length of your next “march,” which again can go in any of the eight directions. “Continue on in this manner until you come upon a square with a number which will carry you just one step beyond the border, thus solving the puzzle.”

Interestingly, Loyd devised this puzzle expressly to defeat Leonhard Euler’s method of solving mazes. “Euler, the great mathematician, discovered a rule for solving all manner of maze puzzles, which, as all good puzzlists know, depends chiefly upon working backwards. This puzzle, however, was built purposely to defeat Euler’s rule and out of many attempts is probably the only one which thwarts his method.” The original puzzle, as published in the New York Journal and Advertiser, contained a flaw that permitted multiple solutions. That’s been corrected here — there’s only one way out.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Extra

On Feb. 6, 1898, a worker preparing the front page of the New York Times added 1 to that day’s issue number, 14,499, and got 15,000.

Amazingly, no one caught the error until 1999, when 24-year-old news assistant Aaron Donovan tallied the dates since the paper’s founding in 1851 and found that the modern issue number was 500 too high.

So on Jan. 1, 2000, the paper turned back the clock, reverting from 51,753 to 51,254.

“There is something that appeals to me about the way the issue number marks the passage of time across decades and centuries,” Donovan wrote in a memo. “It has been steadily climbing for longer than anyone who has ever glanced at it has been alive. The 19th-century newsboy hawking papers in a snowy Union Square is in some minute way bound by the issue number to the Seattle advertising executive reading the paper with her feet propped up on the desk.”

See Time-Machine Journalism and Erratum.

| Oddities