Year: 2018

Hermann Hesse: “We Who Bore the Mark…”

 

Photographers Unknown, We Who Bore the Mark

“We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd. They, too, strove; they, too showed signs of strength and greatness. But as we saw it, whereas we marked men represented Nature’s determination to create something new, individual, and forward-looking, the others lived in the determination to stay the same.”

—Hermann Hesse, Damian, Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

The Dragon Tree

Photographer Unknown, The Dragon Tree (Dracaena draco)

The Dracaena draco, or the Dragon tree, is a subtropical tree in the genus Dracaena, native to the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Madeira, and locally in western Morocco. It has been introduced to the Azores. The tree  is a nmoncot with a branching growth pattern currently placed in the asparagus family. When young it has a single stem. At about ten to fifteen years of age, the stem stops growing and produces a first flower spike with white, lily-like perfumed flowers, followed by coral berries. Soon a crown of terminal buds appears and the plant starts branching. Each branch grows for about ten to fifteen years and re-branches, so a mature plant has an umbrella-like habit. It grows slowly, requiring about ten years to reach 1.2 metres (4 ft) in height but can grow much faster.

Calendar: December 21

A Year: Day to Day Men: 21st of December

The Position Taken

Born in Bologna the twenty-first of December in 1788, Adamo Tadolini was an Italian sculptor. He was a member of a family of sculptors descended from his grandfather Petronio Tadolini, a classical sculptor of works in both marble and terracotta, as well as medals in bronze. This family dynasty of sculptors continued until his great-grandson Enrico Tadolini’s death in 1967. 

Adamo Tadolini attended Balogna’s Accademia di Belle Arti from 1808 until 1813 where he studied under the directorship of sculptor Giacomo De Maria. In 1813, he was awarded a gold medal, the Curlandese Prize from the Accademia, for his terra cotta relief depicting Venus and the Trojan hero Aeneas carrying weapons.  Tadolini was also awarded a four year scholarship to study in Rome. One of the works he created during this scholarship period was a plaster statue of the hero Ajax cursing the gods. 

Tadolini’s skill at sculpture caught the attention of Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova, who at that time was the most celebrated artist in Europe with patrons from the wealthy as well as royal lineages. Canova was given by the Pope the title Minister Plenipotentiary in 1815 and, in the next year, the title of Marquis of Ischia, along with an annual pension of three thousand crowns. Tadolini was invited by Canova to enter into his studio and worked there until 1822. At that time he set up, with assistance from Canova,  his own studio at Via Del Babuino 150 in Rome. This studio is now the Canova-Tadolini Museum and houses the Tadolini family’s vast range of work. 

Among Adamo Tadolini’s many works are the 1823 marble statue “Ganymede and the Eagle” at Chatsworth House, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire; the 1838 marble “Saint Paul” at St. Peter’s Square in the  Vatican; King Carlo Alberto of Sardinia’s commission of “St. Frances de Sales” for St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican; the 1857 statue of King David which is part of the Column of the Immaculate Conception in Rome’s Piazza Mignanelli; the1858 bust of Cardinal Alessandro Lante Montefeltro della Rovere in the Bologna Cathedral: and the1859 bronze equestrian statue of Simón Bolívar, the original casting of three resides at Lima’s Plaza Bolívar.

Tadolini had two sons, Scipione and Tito, both of whom studied under their father at his studio workshop. Scipione Tadolini worked in a romantic form of the Neo-classical tradition whose works included “Saint Michael Overcoming Satan” now in Boston College. Upon the death of his father on the sixteenth of February in 1863, Scipione took ownership of the studio. 

Calendar: December 20

A Year: Day to Day Men: 20th of December

No Stretch of tlhe Imagination

On December 20, 1812, “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is published.

Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, both poets and novelists, were good friends of the Grimm brothers and wanted to publish folk tales. So they asked the brothers to collect oral tales for publication. The Grimm’s collected many old books and asked friends and acquaintances in Kassel to tell tales and to gather stories from others. Jacob and Wilhelm sought to collect these stories in order to write a history of old German Poesie and to preserve history.

The first volume of the first edition was published in 1812, containing 86 stories; the second volume of 70 stories followed in 1815. For the second edition, two volumes were issued in 1819 and a third in 1822, totaling 170 tales. The third edition appeared in 1837; fourth edition, 1840; fifth edition, 1843; sixth edition, 1850; seventh edition, 1857. Stories were added, and also subtracted, from one edition to the next, until the seventh held 211 tales. All editions were extensively illustrated, first by Philipp Grot Johann and, after his death in 1892, by German illustrator Robert Leinweber.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s collection of folktales contains some of the best-known children’s characters in literary history, from Snow White and Rapunzel to Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. Yet the brothers originally filled their book, which became known as “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” with gruesome scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in an R-rated movie. The Grimm brothers never even set out to entertain kids. The first edition of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” was scholarly in tone, with many footnotes and no illustrations. Only later, as children became their main audience, did they take out some of the more adult content.

Calendar: December 19

Year: Day to Day Men: December 19

The Green Door

On the 19th of December in 1971, Stanley Kubrick’s X-rated film “A Clockwork Orange” premiered in New York City. Based on author Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel of the same name, the film commented on juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, psychiatry and other social issues in a dystopian near-future England. The film received mixed reviews and had notable detractors including film critics Stanley Kauffman, Leslie Halliwell and Roger Ebert. In 1972, “A Clockwork Orange” won the New York Film Critics Award.

“A Clockwork Orange” was released a month later in the United Kingdom on the 13th of January in 1972. The film was passed in an uncut version for the UK cinemas despite British authorities considering the film’s sexual violence to be extreme. After reports of copycat acts of violence linked to the movie, Warner Brothers at the request of Kubrick withdrew the film from British release. As a result, it was difficult to see “A Clockwork Orange” in the United Kingdom for a period of twenty-seven years. After Kubrick’s death in 1999, the film was finally re-released in theaters.

In Ireland, “A Clockwork Orange” was banned on the 10th of April in 1973; Warner Brothers did not appeal the decision. Eventually, the film was passed uncut for cinema in December of 1999 and released in theaters in March of 2000. In Singapore, the film was banned for over thirty years and was finally shown uncut with an R21 rating on the 28th of October as part of the 2011 Perspectives Film Festival. 

Under apartheid, the South African government banned it for thirteen years, finally releasing the film with one cut scene to people over the age of twenty-one. Brazil’s military dictatorship banned the film until 1978; it was released in a version with black dots covering the breasts and genitals of the actors in the nude scenes. In Spain, the film debuted at the 1975 Valladolid International Film Festival after students protested and closed the University of Valladolid for two months. Long queues of students formed at the festival and later commercial theaters and arthouses. 

Author Anthony Burgess had mixed opinions about the film. He loved the acting of Malcolm McDowell and Michael Bates and Kubrick’s use of music. He was concerned though that the novel’s final redemptive chapter was missing, a fact he blamed on the American publisher who had omitted the chapter in all US editions prior to 1986. In fact, Kubrick claimed he had not read that chapter until he finished the screenplay; he felt it was unconvincing and inconsistent with the book. 

“A Clockwork Orange” was nominated for numerous awards including four Academy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, and a Director Guild of America Award, among others. It won two New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and the Online Film & Television Association Award (Hall of Fame-Motion Picture).

Notes: Film collector Mark E. Phillips wrote an extensive article on “A Clockwork Orange” for his “NYC in Film” site. The article offers a concise list, in chronological order, of each filming location in London for Kubrick’s masterpiece. Each location, from the Korova Milk Bar to the final scene at Princess Alexandra Hospital, is illustrated by film stills and current photos. Phillips’ article is located at: https://nycinfilm.com/2023/06/04/clockwork/

Director Pedro González Bermúdez made a 2021 documentary entitled “A Forbidden Orange” which examines Spain’s Franco government’s banning of “A Clockwork Orange” and the efforts of a long-running religious film festival, the Seminci in Valladolid, to premiere the film. Produced in collaboration with actor Malcolm McDowell as narrator, this documentary is worth seeing if you are interested in the history of Kubrick’s film.

Calendar: December 18

Year: Day to Day Men: December 18

Locker Room Moment

On the 18th of December in 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed he had discovered fossilized remains of a previously unknown early human, the missing link between apes and man. This human ancestor was named Eoanthropus dawsoni, but became known as Piltdown Man from the gravel pit in which the remains were found. 

Although there were doubts about its authenticity from early 1912, the Piltdown Man remains were widely accepted for many years. In November of 1953, Time magazine published evidence gathered by anthropologist Kenneth Oakley, primatologist Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, and biologist Joseph Weiner that proved the Piltdown Man was a forgery composed of three distinct species. This hoax was notable for the attention it generated on the subject of human evolution and the fact that it took forty-one years to its definitive exposure as a forgery.

In February of 1912, Dawson contacted the Keeper of Geology at London’s Natural History Museum, Arthur Smith Woodward, that he had found a section of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown, East Sussex. Later in the summer, Dawson and Woodward purportedly discovered a jawbone, skull fragments, a set of teeth, and primitive tools at the site. From the outset, the reconstruction of the skull was strongly challenged by researchers.

Waterston, Boule and Miller’s evidence proved the remains of the Piltdown Man was a forgery. The fossils consisted of a human skull of medieval age, a five-hundred year old lower jaw of an orangutan and fossil teeth from a chimpanzee. Someone had simulated age by staining the bones with an iron solution and chromic acid. A microscopic examination of the teeth showed file-marks that had modified the teeth to a shape more suited for human diet. The identity of the forger remains unknown; however the focus on Dawson is supported by evidence regarding other archaeological hoaxes he had perpetrated in the previous two decades.

Notes: The fossil was introduced as evidence by Clarence Darrow in defense of John T. Scopes during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Darrow died in 1938, fifteen years before the Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud.

Calendar: December 17

A Year: Day to Day Men: 17th of December

The Victory of a Clean Sweep

On December 17th of 1531 Pope Clement VII published a papal bull, an official decree, entitled “Cum ad Nihil Magis”, which introduced the Inquisition into Portugal at Evora, Colmbra and Lisbon. The Inquisition eventually extended into the Portuguese colony of Goa for the period between 1562-1563. Its influence was weakened severely by the late eighteenth-century under the government of the 4th Marguês de Pombal, Sebastião José de Carvalho Melo e Daun. The Portuguese Inquisition lasted officially until 1821.

Notes: Duarte de Paz was a representative in Rome of the Portuguese Marrano family. He had begun his career in diplomacy as the Portuguese military attaché for the Marranos. De Paz won the confidence of King John III of Portugal and the Algarves, who knighted him in 1532 and sent him on a secret mission. Instead, De Paz went to Rome to enlist the Curia’s intercession for the Marranos who were accused of lapses into Judaism. 

De Paz had a relaxed and cunning style and plied the cardinals and Pope Clement VII with money made available for this purpose by the Marranos. His success was the issuance on October 1532 of a papal decree repealing the “Cum ad Nihil Magis” of 1531, which had introduced the inquisition into Portugal. 

De Paz’s second success was the issuance of the bull “Sempiterno Regi” pardoning the Marranos for their lapses on the ground that their forced conversions were not valid. Under the new Pope Paul III, he achieved another success with a papal bull that extended the civil rights of the Marranos which resulted in the release of eighteen-hundred Marranos from Portuguese dungeons. 

Duarte de Paz’s insubordinate activities was noticed by King John III who stripped him of his commission and honor. He narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, denied by the king, and proceeded to bring his affairs to a close. Accused by the Marranos of having taken a missing four thousand ducats, De Paz denounced the family and traveled to Italy. Surprised and imprisoned in Ferrara, he openly espoused Judaism upon his release and migrated to Turkey where, shortly before his death, he reportedly became a Muslim.

An extensive history and description of the Portuguese Inquisition process can be found at: http://www.jewishwikipedia.info/auto_de_fe.html

Calendar: December 16

A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of December

Observing the Street Below

The sixteenth of December marks the beginning of the 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a conical Italian volcano built up by many layers of hardened lava and unconsolidated material. The eruption, marked by columns of volcanic debris, ash and hot gases, buried many villages under the resulting lava flows. It is estimated that four-thousand people were killed by the eruption, which was so intense that it lowered the summit of Vesuvius by four hundred and fifty meters.

Located on the Gulf of Naples in Campania, Mount Vesuvius has a long historic and literary tradition. At the time of the 79 AD eruption, the volcano was considered a divinity of  nature. The Roman cities surrounding the volcano regarded Mount Vesuvius as being devoted to Hercules. This was particularly true for the city of Herculaneum ,which was named after its mythical founder. Frescoes depicting Vesuvius as a serpent decorated many of the household shrines in Pompeii;  inscriptions on walls linked the power of the god Jupiter to the volcano, IOVI VESVVIO, or Jupiter Vesuvius.

Mount Vesuvius has erupted multiple times with varying grades of severity. All of its eruptions included explosive outbursts named Plinian after the Roman writer Pliny the Younger, who published a detailed account of the 79 AD eruption that killed his uncle. That eruption was largest and most destructive of all Vesuvius eruptions. Its cloud of super-heated gases and particles reached a height of thirty-three kilometers. The molten rock, pumice and hot ash ejecta reached sped at a rate of  one and a half million tons per second. This volcanic event destroyed several Roman towns and completely obliterated Pompeii and Herculaneum under massive pyroclastic surges and ash fall deposits.

Today, Mount Vesuvius is considered the world’s most dangerous volcano. This is due to two main factors: it has erupted violently and frequently through the years and the large number of people living in its vicinity. The area surrounding Mount Vesuvius is the most densely populated volcanic region in the world. Three million people live near enough to be affected by an eruption, with at least six-hundred thousand in the danger zone. Mount Vesuvius is among the most closely monitored volcanoes in the world. The network consists of a number of fixed seismic stations on the surface of the earth with sensors that detect the motion of the soil, changes in the gravimetric field and indicative shifts in the magnetic masses in the subsurface.  

Calendar: December 15

A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of December

Garçon Model Briefs

On December 15, 1939, the drama film “Gone with the Wind”, directed by Victor Fleming and starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, premiered in Atlanta at the Loew’s Grand Theatre.

On September 9, 1939, David O. Selznick, his wife, Irene, investor John Witney and film editor Hal Kern drove out to Riverside, California to preview it at the Fox Theater. The film was still a rough cut at this stage, missing completed titles and lacking special optical effects. It ran for four hours and twenty-five minutes, but would later be cut down to under four hours for its proper release. A double bill of “Wild Nights” and “Beau Geste” was playing, and after the first feature it was announced that the theater would be screening a preview; the audience were informed they could leave but would not be readmitted once the film had begun, nor would phone calls be allowed once the theater had been sealed.

When the title appeared on the screen the audience cheered, and after it had finished it received a standing ovation. In his biography of Selznick, David Thomson wrote that the audience’s response before the film had even started “was the greatest moment of Selznick’s life, the greatest victory and redemption of all his failings”, with Selznick describing the preview cards as “probably the most amazing any picture has ever had.”

About 300,000 people came out in Atlanta for the film’s premiere on December 15, 1939. It was the climax of three days of festivities hosted by Mayor William B, Hartsfield, which included a parade of limousines featuring stars from the film, receptions, thousands of Confederate flags and a costume ball. Eurith D. Rivers, the governor of Georgia at that time, declared December 15 a state holiday. Residents and visitors to Atlanta lined the streets for up to seven miles to watch a procession of limousines bring the stars from the airport.

Only Leslie Howard and Victor Fleming chose not to attend: Howard had returned to England due to the outbreak of World War II, and Fleming had fallen out with Selznick and declined to attend any of the premieres. Hattie McDaniel was also absent, as she and the other black cast members were prevented from attending the premiere due to Georgia’s Jim Crow laws, which would have kept them from sitting with their white colleagues. Upon learning that McDaniel had been barred from the premiere, Clark Gable threatened to boycott the event, but McDaniel convinced him to attend.

Calendar: December 14

A Year: Day to Day Men: 14th of December

Crouching in Socks and Sneakers

On the fourteenth of December in 1782, the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, performed the first test-flight of an unmanned hot air balloon in France. 

The Montgolfier brothers were born into a family of paper manufacturers. Joseph-Michel was the twelfth child of Pierre Montgolfier and Anne Duret; Jacques-Étienne was the fifteenth child and was later sent to Paris to train as an architect. After the death of the eldest son who was his father’s business successor, Étienne was recalled from Paris to long the family’s paper manufacturing business. 

Both Joseph-Michel and Étienne were talented innovators and inventors. Joseph-Michel invented the self-acting hydraulic ram in 1796 and Étienne founded the first paper-making vocational school in France. For their business, the brothers together invented a process to manufacture transparent paper vellum, suitable for use in situations where tracing was required. As avid balloonists, they invented the Montgolfière-style hot air balloon, a globe aèrostatique, with which Jacques Étienne made the first piloted ascent by humans in 1783.

Interested in aeronautics, Joseph-Michel had built parachutes as early as 1775. Watching the embers rising from a fire, he wondered is the same force could be used for a military air assault. Joseph-Michel  believed that the smoke was the buoyant force which lifted the embers; from that assumption he preferred to use smoldering fuel for his experiments. He built a test structure of a very thin wood box with a light-weight taffeta cloth lid. After lighting crumbled paper in the box, the structure lifted off the stand and touched the ceiling. 

After recruiting Étienne through an urgent message, the brothers built a similar structure but three times the size with a volume twenty-seven times greater. On December 14th of 1782, they ignited the wood and hay in the fire box; the lifting force was more than expected and they lost control of the craft. The device floated nearly two kilometers but was destroyed after landing by a passing citizen.

Calendar: December 13

A Year: Day to Day Men; 13th of December

Black Leather Sofa with Pillow

On the thirteenth of December in 1577, the English explorer and privateer Francis Drake set sail from England on a mission to circumnavigate the world aboard the “Pelican”. 

Born in Tavistock, Devon, Francis Drake was the eldest of twelve sons of Edmund Drake and Mary Mylwaye. As his birth date was not formally recorded, the date of 1540-1541 derives from two portraits painted in his later life. Drake was placed at an early age into the household of sea-captain William Hawkins and began his life as an apprentice sailor on Hawkins’s boats. A purser by the age of eighteen, Drake was given a position with the owner and master of a small trading vessel along the coast of England, France and the Low Countries. Satisfied with Drake’s conduct, the ship’s master, at his death, bequeathed the vessel to Drake. 

Beginning in 1562, Drake became involved with the West African slave trade. There is some anecdotal evidence to support his sailing on several slaving voyages with Sir John Hawkins, considered the first English merchant to profit from the Triangle Trade which sailed enslaved people from Africa to the Spanish colonies in the West Indies during the sixteenth-century. It is known that he sailed on a slave voyage under John Lovell’s command, sponsored by Hawkins, in 1566 and, in 1567, accompanied Hawkins on his last voyage around Cape Verde; the voyage was considered unsuccessful as more than ninety enslaved Africans were released without payment. Although not a member of the consortium of investors, Drake was in his twenties and a member of the crew which shared in the ship’s profits, thus being culpable for his participation in the slaving enterprise.

In the period from 1572 to 1573, Francis Drake attacked the Spanish colonies as a privateer under English authority. After a failed attempt in July of 1572 to capture the Spanish town of  Nombre de Dios, the storage point for the gold and silver treasure of Peru, Drake raided Spanish galleons along the coast of Panama. He also looted the mule trains that transported the gold, silver and trade goods from Panama City. Drake eventually captured the Spanish silver train at Nombre de Dios in April of 1573 which made him both rich and famous. From the heavily laden mule train, they had captured approximately twenty tons of silver and gold. It was during this expedition that Drake and his lieutenant John Oxenham became the first Englishmen to see the Pacific Ocean from the central mountains of the Isthmus of Panama.

Queen Elizabeth I likely invested in Drake’s 1577 voyage to South America but never issued him a formal commission. This was the first circumnavigation in fifty-eight years, the last one being Garcia Jofre de Loaisa’s Spanish expedition 1525 to1536. Drake and his fleet set out from Plymouth on the fifteenth of November but were forced by bad weather and repairs to return to Plymouth. Drake set sail again on the thirteenth of December aboard the Pelican with four other ships and one hundred sixty-four men. 

On the twenty-sixth of September in 1580, the “Golden Hind”, formerly the Pelican, sailed into Plymouth with Drake and a crew of fifty-nine men, along with a rich cargo of spices and captured Spanish treasure. The queen’s half-share of the cargo surpassed the rest of the crown’s income for that entire year. Drake was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the Earth; his voyage was also the second to arrive back home with at least one intact ship. All written records of the voyage were to be become the queen’s secrets of the Realm; Drake and other participants were sworn to secrecy on pain of death. Elizabeth I wanted the voyage kept hidden from Spain, England’s rival.