Month: June 2018

Ronald Brooks Kitaj

Ronald Brooks Kitaj, “Novella in Terre Verte”, 1992, Oil on Canvas, 60 x 60 Inches

Ronald Brooks Kitaj was an American artist who spent much of his life in England. He became a merchant seaman with a Norwegian freighter when he was seventeen. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Cooper Union in New York City. After serving in the US Army for two years, he moved to England to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford and then the Royal College of Art in London.

Kitaj had a significant impact on British pop art, with his figurative paintings featuring areas of bright color, economic use of line and overlapping planes which resemble collages. His more complex compositions built on his line work using a montage practice, which he called ‘agitational usage’. Kitaj often depicted disorienting landscapes and impossible 3D constructions, with exaggerated and pliable human forms. He often assumed a detached outsider point of view, in conflict with dominant historical narratives.

Calendar: June 9

 

A Year: Day to Day Men: 9th of June

Visualizing the Source of the Sea

On June 9, 1909. twenty-two year old Alice Huyler Ramsey leaves home to drive across the United States coast to coast.

Alice Taylor Huyler was the daughter of John Huyler, a lumber dealer, and Ada Mumford Farr. She attended Vassar College from 1903-1905. In 1906 she married congressman John Ramsey of Hackensack, New Jersey and settled in that town. They had two children; John Jr. born in 1907 and Alice born in 1910.

After receiving a new Maxwell runabout as a gift from her husband in 1908, Alice Ramsey became an avid driver and entered the 1908 American Automobile Association’s endurance race, being one of only two women to participate. During that event, Carl Kelsey, who was a publicity man for the Maxwell-Briscoe company, proposed that Alice Ramsey attempt a  transcontinental journey with the company’s backing. It was to be a publicity stunt with the company providing a new 1909 Maxwell touring car for the journey and all parts and assistance as needed. This journey was part of a marketing strategy to encourage women to drive cars.

On June 9th, Alice Ramsey, twenty-two years old and now a mother of one, began the journey from Hell Gate in Manhattan, New York to San Francisco in a green Maxwell 30. She was accompanied by 16-year old Hermine Jahns and two older sisters-in-laws, none of whom could drive. They used maps from the AAA for guidance in their journey. Only 152 miles of the 3,600 mile trip were paved. The women mostly navigated by following telephone poles, using the poles with the most wires as the guide to where they hoped would be a town.

Over the course of the journey, Alice Ramsey cleaned spark plugs, repaired a broken brake pedal, changed eleven flat tires, and slept with the others in the car when stuck in the mud, a common occurrence. The journey took 59 days to drive coast to coast across the United States at that time in history. They arrived in San Francisco amid great crowds on August 7, 1909, about three weeks later than originally planned.

Alice Huyler Ramsey was named the “Woman Motorist of the Century” by the American Automobile Association in 1960. In her later years, she lived in California, where in 1961 she wrote and published her book “Veil, Duster, and Tire Iron”, the tale of her transcontinental adventure. Always an enthusiastic driver, Ramsey drove across country more than thirty times between 1909 and 1975, by which time she was 79 years old. She became, on October 17, 2000, the first woman inducted into the Automobile Hall of Fame.

“Good driving has nothing to do with sex. It’s all above the collar.”- Alice Huyler Ramsey, Ms. Magazine, February 1975

Arnald Amar, “Salvacci Denducci Pace”

Armand Amar, “Salvacci Denducci Pace” from the Album “Bab’Aziz”

Armand Amar is a French composer who grew up in Morocco. He plays congas, the tabla and the zarb. His works are focused particularly on Eastern music. He is the author of several ballets and soundtrack films such as “The Trail”, “Days of Glory”, “Earth from Above”, and “Home’. In 1994 he founded the label Long Distance with his partners Alain Weber and Peter Gabriel.

Victor Hugo: ” A Certain Amount of Reverie is Good”

The Sources of Reverie

“A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas… Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie it’s pleasure.”

―Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Calendar: June 8

 

A Year: Day to Day Men: 8th of June

Decorative Art

June 8, 1933 was the birthdate of American actress and comedian, Joan Rivers.

Joan Rivers was one of America’s first successful female stand-up comics in an aggressive tradition that had been almost exclusively the province of men. She would take the stage in a demure black sheath dress and ladylike pearls, a tiny bouffant blonde with a genteel air of sorority decorum. Then her biting and edgy stream-of-consciousness take on national heroes and sacrosanct cultural idols would begin.

Joan Alexandra Molinsky was born in Brooklyn on June 8, 1933, to immigrants from Russia. Her father, a doctor, did comic impersonations of patients. Her mother insisted on piano lessons and private schools for Joan and her sister, Barbara, who grew up in Brooklyn and Larchmont. Joan attended Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn, Connecticut College for Women and Barnard College. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she graduated in 1954 with a degree in English.

Joan Rivers struggled for years, taking small parts off Off-Broadway and working in grimy cafes and small clubs. She made her breakthrough as a guest in 1965 on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”. Over the next two decades she became a regular guest host on the show, a Las Vegas headliner and a television star. In 1986, Rivers hit the big time with a $10 million contract as host of the new Fox network’s weeknight entry, “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers,” competing directly with Carson, her old benefactor. After less than a year on the air, she was fired by Fox when her ratings slumped.

For years Joan Rivers marketed her lines of jewelry and fashion on shopping channels. In the mid-1990s, she turned up at the Grammys, Golden Globes and Academy Awards, first for E! Entertainment network and then for the TV Guide Channel, poking a microphone into the faces of the stars on red carpets. In 2010 she became star of the E! show “Fashion Police,” where she and a panel gleefully critiqued celebrities’ wardrobes.

Joan Rivers weathered 50 years in show business, appeared in thousands of TV shows, more than a dozen films and many nightclubs; written twelve books; raised millions for causes including AIDS, Guide Dogs for the Blind and cystic fibrosis; and amassed about $290 million. She won a Daytime Emmy for her talk show “The Joan Rivers Show” and was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in the title role of Lenny Bruce’s mother in “Sally Marr …and Her Escorts”. She died in 2014 at Mount Sinai Hospital after going into cardiac arrest; she was 81.

Well of Chand Baori

Photographer Unknown, Well of Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India

The Well of Chand Baori is situated in the village of Abhaneri in the state of Rajasthan, India.. There are 3500 narrow steps extending for a height of thirteen stories. It extends approximately one hundred feet into the ground making it one of the deepest and largest stepwells in India. It was built by King Chanda of the Nikumbh dynasty between 800-900 CE and was dedicate to Hashat Mata, Goddess of Joy and Happiness upon completion.

The well was designed to conserve as much water as possible in the extremely dry area of Rajasthan. At the bottom of the well, the air remains about 6 degrees cooler than the temperature at ground level. it is used as a gathering place for locals during intense heat of the day. The site has been used as a filming location for the movies “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”.

Katsuhiro Otomo

Katsuhiro Otomo, “Akira”, Volume 5, March 2011, Cover Illustration, Published by Kodansha Comics

“In the 21st century, the once glittering Neo-Tokyo lies in ruin, leveled in minutes by the infinite power of the child psychic Akira. From the flooded wasteland of rubble and anarchy rises the Great Tokyo Empire, populated by a ragtag army of zealots and crazies who worship and fear Akria and his mad prime minister, Tetsuo, an angry teen with immense powers of his own– and equally immense, twisted ambitions. The world at large is not taking the threat lying down, and the military strength of the planet is massing to take on the empire, but will technology’s most advanced weaponry be enough to destroy Akira? And are Tetsuo’s rapidly growing paranormal abilities a potentially greater threat?” Stay tuned for more… .