Somehow this 1962 MacLaren’s Imperial Cheddar Club Cheese (club referring to a style that blends cheddar with other mature cheeses is flavoured with peppercorn and garlic, the label since wholly acquired by Kraft) advertisement subtlety prefigures the whole distracted boyfriend, me—also me meme.
Hazel Terry of The Art Room Plant provides an exquisite and circumspect tour of the Watts Memorial Mortuary Chapel in the village cemetery of Compton in Surrey that an absolute gem, inside and out of Celtic Revival style filtered through Art Nouveau and Romanesque influences. Beginning construction of a chapel for a new cemetery on the commission of the parish council in 1896, work was overseen by local artist in residence Mary Fraser-Tytler but virtually the entire village—many of whom were precarious-employed as agricultural workers—took part. Much more to explore at the link above.
The mission to inspire an eponymously titled Adam Ant song in 1984, NASA’s Apollo 9—the third crewed undertaking in the programme, took off from Kennedy Space Center on this day fifty years ago for ten days of trials in low Earth, geosynchronous orbit to test extravehicular activities (previously), spacewalk, and decoupling, docking performance of the gangly landing module and the bulbous command and service module that looked like a diving bell were given the title nicknames respectively and had those call-signs for radio communication. This battery of rigorous rehearsal helped ensure the success of later missions to the lunar surface.
Honoured as a laureate by the American Institute of Graphic Arts for his significant contributions to the field, the life and career of Alvin Lustig (*1915 - †1955) by complications of diabetes.
Lustig’s interests and acumen were not only restricted to designing book jackets and covers and magazine illustration but also to architecture, working with Victor Gruen on retail outlets, and interior design with a special emphasis on office spaces. His “Lustig Chair” made for Paramount studios was particular popular and inspires and informs retro-styles to this day. At the invitation of Joseph Albers, Lustig briefly taught at Black Mountain College. His wife and collaborator, Elaine Lustig Cohen (*1927 - †2016), was an accomplished artist, archivist and designer in her own right, sharing the same distinctions as her late husband and earning more over the course of her professional career.
On this day in 1919, delegates from around the world representing labour rights groups and revolutionary socialist movements gathered in Moscow, the newly designated capital of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic for a four-day summit to establish Communist International.
The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev and Joseph Stalin, were joined by left-leaning organisations from Germany, Denmark, the US, the UK, Australia, China and Japan. The ongoing Russian Civil War made publicising the meeting difficult as well as travel for sending-parties—with many in attendance not formal plenipotentiaries for the groups that they were representing—so after a bit of housekeeping, a follow up session to be held in the summer of 1920 in Petrograd was decided up on, with decisions on major structural matters and steering committee leadership deferred until then.
Drawing on several sources, Just a Car Guy introduces us to the passenger line operated by the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad—later by the Erie Railway—that shuttled holiday-makers to resorts in the Poconos, marketing the prestige train as Phoebe Snow, to demonstrate how anthracite powered trains had cleaner exhaust than the steam locomotives of its competition. The engine was kept a pristine white, supposedly, to show when pulling into each station, that passengers need not suffer indignities of soiled clothes thanks to clean coal. Read more at the link up top.
