a great day in harlem

On this day in 1958, Esquire Magazine photographer Art Kane, famous for his iconic framing of many musicians and figures in the fashion industry, assembled fifty-seven jazz performers with some of the children from the neighbourhood at a brownstone between Fifth and Madison Avenues for a group portrait, which remains one of the most important cultural and academic artefacts in studying and understanding the impact of the genre.
Among those assembled include Count Basie, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Milt Hinton, Charlie Mingus, Gene Krupa, Maxine Sullivan and Sahib Shihab. Visit this website to learn about each person pictured and hear a sample of their music.  The photograph became the subject of a documentary film which was told in the form of overlapping biographies of each of the subjects and went on to inspire many homages, like 1988’s “A Great Day in Hip-Hop” or the 2004 and 2008 “A Great Day in London” and “A Great Day in Paris” that celebrated artist of Caribbean, Asian and African descent living and working in those cities.

carlina acaulis

Taking a walk through the woods, I noticed in a few select spots, along the verge of the path and outside the places dappled by shadow a sort of silvery thistle that while sticking me as somehow very familiar seemed still an exotic treat. Afterwards I learned that these flowers are indeed called a silver thistle (die Silber- oder Rhöndistel being native to Alpine regions and this area), differing from their more common, stalked relatives due to having no stem (a-caulis), an incidence of what’s called inflorescence where the blossom comes directly out of the leaves.
Wanting to protect its relatively exposed pollen supply safe until a bee or butterfly comes along, the thistle will close up the flower presaging rain showers as was a traditional way of forecasting the weather—especially as the plant is likely to flower in August through September. The plant, as with other thistle varieties, was important for folk medicine for its recognised antimicrobial and diuretic properties, as well as being edible—the thistle being the undomesticated version of the artichoke.
I also realised where the image of the flower came from: for years we’ve been using up a particular notepad for shopping and to-do lists whose edges are printed with patterns in Nature, with the silver thistle as one of the examples of precision engineering and design.

horseless carriage

Although very much retold from an America perspective, it was nonetheless interesting to consider the etymological journey we embarked on to get to the colloquial term car (from cart)—automobile, a French convention ultimately with Greek roots, being a technical, industry term (similar to the formal German PKW—Personnen Kraftfahrzeuge) that’s only used in North America. Of the early trade names suggested before reaching a critical mass and adopting a standard name, early media coverage referred to prototypes as the Motorig, Buggyaut, Tonneau, the Diamote and the Mocole—among others.  Be sure to visit Jalopnik at the link above to discover more car-related cul-de-sacs and points-of-departure.

freedom of religion is also freedom from religion

We were a little familiar with the personage of Ingersoll (*1833 - †1899) though the occasional quotation featured on Cynical-C, whose author has happily reconsidered retiring from blogging, but had not invested learning more about the figure, who is regarded as one of the greater orators and politicians of the United States of America during the Golden Age of Free Thought (the freethinking movement that coalesced with the conclusion of the US Civil War in 1865 and lasted until roughly the outbreak of World War I—but did not get the needed extra academic nudge until learning that this day is (among a few other things) the anniversary of Robert Green Ingersoll’s birth.
I wonder what the noted lawyer and politician called “The Great Agnostic” would make of such a day of obligation. Amazingly popular and charismatic as a speaker, despite attacks levied against his character for disdaining organised religion and spirituality that did not compliment scientific inquiry, logic and humanism, audiences would pay the sum of one-dollar entry fees (nominally, around thirty dollars in today’s money but that’s a simplistic comparison considering how far a dollar stretched back then and what else a person could get instead for that admission price) and attended to Ingersoll’s every word. Credited with informing the way we understand the separation of church and state as well as reviving Thomas Payne as an important, foundational figure in socio-political thought, many of Ingersoll’s lectures, whose topics were not limited to disabusing superstition and fealty but also humility, family, universal suffrage, civil rights and Shakespeare, were improvised but many others were committed to print—which one can peruse here in full or, if you’d rather, as a daily digest.

peer of the realm

Marquess of the baronet of Anglesey (Ardalydd Môn), privy counsellor to the courts of Victoria and Edward VII and nicknamed “Toppy,” Henry Cyril Paget (*1875 - †1905) lived a short and by the reckoning of his of his fellow royals a destitute and squandered one. At age twenty-three Paget married his cousin Lilian Chetwynd and the same year came into his title with the death of his father and inherited extensive estates throughout England and Wales. Paget had the chapel of the family’s country seat converted into a one hundred-fifty seat theatre (modelled off the Dresden Opera) and staged everything from elaborate costume dramas to cabaret for invited audiences.
Paget’s plans to tour with his theatre company, already mortgaging some of property to fund the excursion, was a step too far and she had their marriage annulled—though later cared for him at his death in Monaco, bankrupt and suffering from a prolonged illness (he’d always been somewhat restrained by a weak constitution) and possibly eager to win the right to hold onto some of his prized-possessions at Monte Carlo. All of it, the jewels, private custom rail cars for his actors, the clothes, the costumes—even his dogs, were auctioned off. Neither gambling nor lovers seemed to be the cause of Paget’s downfall, however—only a rather innocent though irresponsible propensity for profligacy and performance—also nicknamed the Dancing Marquess, Paget had a signature slinky snake dance that he would do no matter what the occasion, the later which none faulted him for. Even if the obituaries in the newspapers as well as the heir (another cousin) who inherited what was left of the Anglesey lands plus the debt were harsh, that heir ordered destroyed all of Paget’s diaries and correspondence, so we’ll never know if there was more to the story. Whatever the case, the people in his troupe as well as those associated with the family manors genuinely cared for their eccentric lord and patron.

a high-toned, candied muskiness

We’ve just been made aware that the common North American grape variety for wines, juices and jams is called the Niagara and is a hybrid of the European species Vitis vinifera and the native Vitis labrusca—the fox grape, named for its earthy character and cause of and partial, unsatisfying rescue from the French wine blight of the 1850s due to its export overseas with a pernicious aphid in tow—through this illustration from the 1901 Woodlawn Nurseries Spring seed catalogue. The grape was first created through selective cross-breeding in 1868 and are cultivated along the eastern seaboard and in the province of Ontario. It was also nice to be reminded that there was once a convention of the mail-order seed catalogue that while by its nature is a nod to competition and proprietorship also recalls a time when barriers to entry were low and farmers and gardeners weren’t beholden to one source.

tuppence a bag

I had the thought walking through the city the other day noticing the persistent scratching and pecking of pigeons amid all the rubbish on the streets and wondered if the two factors (pigeons aren’t pests, just opportunistic and very tolerable of human vermin) could be combined to achieve a solution. I don’t want to frame pigeons as underachievers but I don’t know if they can be trained—although doves seem very patient and compliant with prestidigitators and seen to have enjoyed their work as emissaries—to pick up and sort trash.
I’ll have to ask a friend who is a pigeon fancier what he thinks of my scheme. Maybe it’s simpler to train people to be decent and not litter rather than have someone else clean-up after us. In any case—that same thought has been turned into a real exercise at a historic park in France, where rangers and handlers are training rooks to spruce up the place and pick up any stray litter, human visitors being generally respectful about leaving nothing else behind, in exchange for a small morsel of bird food. What do you think? As with any intervention, there could be unforeseen consequences. Perhaps corvids are better at teaching other birds to execute clean-up missions. I think, especially with the insect population dangerously low with knock-on effects up the food chain, maybe this relieves some pressure on the competition for scarce resources by feeding the birds as a reward.

darling, it’s better down where it’s wetter

Via Boing Boing, we are treated to a rather remarkable demonstration video from Marine Imaging Technologies’ new HYDRUS camera. An array of eight underwater cameras whose perspectives are selectable as if the footage were in real time surveys a reef off the Cayman Islands under natural, low light conditions, giving one a taste of what live-cams undersea could offer.