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The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Four
“Don’t be afraid, the darkness you’re in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you’ve never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn’t frighten you…my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside”
José Saramago, All the Names
Photographers Unknown, If One Has Only One Good Memory Left in His Heart
“You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”
―
Photographers Unknown, Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Eleven
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
―
Photographers Unknown, The Bath
“Okay, this is the wisdom. First, time spent on reconnaissanse is never wasted. Second, almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon. And finally, there is no problem on Earth that can’t be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea.”
―
Photogaphers Unknown, And Then–The Glory
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. ”
―
Photographers Unknown, The Darkness and The Light
“For those who can see well in the darkness, there is no darkness and for those who cannot see well even in the light, there is no light.”
― Mehmet Murat Ildan
Photographers Unknown, His Butt: Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Twenty Eight
“All shadows of clouds the sun cannot hide
like the moon cannot stop oceanic tide;
but a hidden star can still be smiling
at night’s black spell on darkness, beguiling”
―
Photographer Unknown, (The White T-Shirt and the Green Shutters)
Photographers Unknown, Forms and Conceptions
“The function of ritual and myth is to make possible, and then to facilitate, the jump—by analogy. Forms and conceptions that the mind and its senses can comprehend are presented and arranged in such a way as to suggest a truth or openness beyond. And then, the conditions for meditation having been provided, the individual is left alone. Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness—that void, or being, beyond the categories —into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved. Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means—themselves of the nature of the world of names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves.”
―
Year: Day to Day Men: December 31
Half-Filled Tub
On December 31st of 1759, Arthur Guinness signed a nine-thousand year lease on an abandoned property and became a prominent figure within the Dublin brewery scene.
In September of1755, Arthur Guinness purchased his first brewery, a three-story building located on the confluence of the River Liffey in Leixlip, County Kildare. The river provided power and water for brewing; the hops were brought from Dublin along the Dublin-Galway road. The origin of the yeast used by Guinness is unknown, but is speculated to have come from Kildare. In September of 1756, Guinness leased several more properties to extend his business.
Leaving his Leixlip brewery in the care of his brother Richard, Guinness moved to Dublin, an area of affordable property due to a recent number of economic upsets and bank collapses. He was particularly interested in acquiring a brewery at St. James Gate that had sat abandoned for nine years. A large site of four acres, 1.6 hectares, it contained a gristmill, two malt houses, a brewhouse and stables. The property’s location near St. James Gate would be served by a terminus of the newly built Grand Canal.
The current owner of the Dublin property was the Rainsford family. It was originally owned by Sir Mark Rainsford, the Lord Mayor of Dublin and a manufacturer of beer and fine ales. The business was passed on to his son, also named Mark, who leased the business in 1715 to a Captain Paul Espinasse. In 1750, the Rainsford family resumed ownership of the business and the site. On the thirty-first of December in 1759, Arthur Guinness leased the site from Sir Mark Rainsford’s grandson, Mark Rainsford III. Under the agreement, Guinness made a £100 down-payment and agreed to pay an additional £45 annually for nine-thousand years.
The terms of the lease involving the water usage became a major problem between Arthur Guinness and the Dublin Corporation, the city’s administrator. By 1773, the Corporation claimed his brewery was using more water than that specified by his lease, a claim disputed by Guinness. However in April of 1775, the Corporation discovered that Guinness had made alterations to the pipe system that allowed him to draw more water than he was allowed. Both sides eventually settled the matter in court in 1785; Guinness agreed to lease water from the City of Dublin for an annual charge of £10.
While popular in Dublin, Guinness did not immediately achieve dominance among the regional brewers; his sales were far below those of such brewers as Taylor, Phepoe and Thwaites. Dublin brewers were not as successful as English brewers whose imported porter was the dominant drink in the city. In 1778, Guinness added porter to his ale-heavy brewery and, by 1783, it dominated his business. By 1796, porter production at the St. James Gate Brewery was five times the ale output; ale brewing at the site ended on the 22nd of April in 1799,
Although he limited his brewery to dark beer, Arthur Guinness experimented with different forms of porter. His concept of a West India Porter, with greater hops and alcohol content, later became the basis for Guinness Foreign Extra Stout. In 1777, the British House of Commons formally changed the tax code regarding domestic Irish porter; this allowed the creation of a market for the importation of Irish porter into England, which led to beer exportation as a staple of the Irish economy.
A Year: Day to Day Men: December 30
Scrawls on the Wall
On December 30th in 1809, the city of Boston passed a law which made the wearing of masks at balls illegal.
The anit-masquerade opinion was already established in England before masked balls spread overseas to the colonies. Opponents in eighteenth-century England crusaded against gatherings that were tarnishing the country’s morals. The epistolary novelist Samuel Richardson, author of the 1740 “Virtue Rewarded”, asserted that public masquerades presented frightening possibilities of disguise, role-playing and sexual freedom for women.
As masquerade balls became popular in the colonies, several cities began to ban masks. In 1808, a year before Boston’s law, Philadelphia made masquerades and masked balls illegal. The city supported the law by asserting dances were common meeting places for those interested in sex commerce, and masked balls created a sense of anonymity for those participants.
In 1848, Boston extended its masked ball law by adding the following section:
“Any person who shall get up and set on foot, or cause to be published, or otherwise aid in getting up and promoting any masked ball, or other public assembly, at which the company wears masks, or other disguises, and to which admission is obtained upon payment of money, or the delivery of any valuable thing, or by any ticket or voucher obtained for money, or any valuable thing, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding five hundred dollars; and for repetition of the offense, by imprisonment in the common jail or house of correction, not exceeding one year.”
On the first of April in 1963, Boston’s anti-masquerade law was repealed. It should be noted that Boston, with its Puritan roots, had a history that emphasized proper behavior and refraining from frivolity. In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which contained Boston, enacted a law called “Penalty for Keeping Christmas”. The idea was that such festivals, superstitiously kept in other countries, were a great dishonor of God and offense of others. People who were found celebrating Christmas by failing to work, feasting, or any other way, had to pay five shillings for every offense, about fifty dollars today. This law was in effect for twenty-two years.
Year: Day to Day Men: December 23
The Blue Leather Armchair
December 23rd of 1912 marks the release of director Mack Sennett’s comedy short “Hoffmeyer’s Legacy”, notable for being the first Keystone Cops comedy. There are no known existing copies of this film; it is now considered a lost work.
Mack Sennett was a Canadian-American producer, director, actor and studio head. Born in Danville, Quebec in 1880, he started his career in films with the Biograph Company of New York City, which during the height of the silent era was the most prominent and respected film studio in the United States. In 1912, Sennett, with backing from the owners of the New York Motion Picture Company, opened Keystone Studios in California. This studio possessed the first fully-enclosed film stage and studio ever constructed.
At Keystone Studios in 1912, Sennett created the slapstick antics of the Keystone Kops. The idea for the Keystone Kops came from Hank Mann, a Russian-American comedian who became one of the first Keystone Kops. Mann played the police chief Tehiezel in the group’s first film, “Hoffmeyer’s Legacy”. The popularity of the Keystone Kops began with the 1913 comedy short “The Bangville Police” which had comedian Ford Sterling in the role of chief.
Notable members of the Keystone Kops were comedic character actor Edgar Kennedy; Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, one of the most popular silent stars of the 1910s; William Frawley known for his later role as Fred Mertz in “I Love Lucy”; and Alfred St. John known for his scruffy character role in both the 1940 “Billy the Kid” and 1941 “Lone Rider” series. The casting of the Keystone police changed from one film to the next; many of the members were per diem actors who remain uncredited.
Mack Sennett continued producing films with the Keystone Kops through the 1920s but, with the arrival of sound films, the group became less popular. In 1935, Warner Brothers director Ralph Staub staged a revival of the group with his short film “Keystone Hotel” which featured the Kops’ frantic movements. Homages to the group appeared in the 1939 “Hollywood Cavalcade” which had Buster Keaton in a Keystone chase scene, and the 1955 “Abbot and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops” which include stuntmen dressed as the Kops in a lengthy chase scene. The “Abbot and Costello” film had cameo appearances by two of the original Kops, Hank Mann and Heinie Conklin, as well as a cameo by Mack Sennett. The master of comedy, Mel Brooks included a Keystone Kops-styled chase scene in his 1976 comedy “Silent Movie”.
Year: Day to Day Men: December 22
Filtered Light
On the 22nd of December in 1885, Itō Hirobumi, a samurai, became the first Prime Minister of Japan during the Meiji era. The Meiji era, which extended from October of 1868 to July of 1912, was the first half of the Empire of Japan. It was a period of movement from an isolated feudal society at risk of colonization to a modern, industrialized nation state influenced by Western scientific, technological, political, legal and aesthetic ideas.
Itō Hirobumi was the son of a modest samurai family in the Chōshū domain of western Japan. He grew up at a time of convulsive political conditions during the decline of the Tokugawa shogunate which had governed Japan since 1603. Itō was sent to England in 1863 by the leaders of Chōshū to study naval science. He played a minor role in the events leading to the 1868 Meiji Restoration, a movement which overthrew the shogunate and reestablished the formal authority of the Emperor.
Itō’s role in the Meiji Restoration brought him into contact with Kido Takayoshi who became one of the great leaders of early Meiji Japan and an important mentor to Itō. His connections with Kido and Ōkubo Toshimichi, one of the leaders of the Restoration, enabled him to perform government assignments to the United States and the Iwakura Mission to Europe as well as study matters such as taxation, treaty revision, and budgetary systems.
When Ōkubo was assassinated in 1878, Itō Hirobumi succeeded him as Minister of Home Affairs. This advancement brought him into conflict with the ambitious statesman Ōkuma Shigenobu. Itō forced Ōkuma out of the government in 1881 and persuaded the government to adopt a constitution. The Emperor proclaimed the constitution in 1889 and, in the next year, the National Diet was established. The National Diet is the legislature of Japan consisting of the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors, both elected and responsible for nominating the Prime Minister.
At this time, Itō was the most important person in the Meiji government. Serious about establishing a constitutional government, he and other officials had spent one and a half years in Europe studying under constitutional scholars. This writing of basic rights and the establishment of the Diet was a very progressive act given Japan’s samurai background and its tense domestic and foreign problems.
Itō Hirobumi remained a prominent figure in the 1890s and achieved two important successes. The first was an agreement with Great Britain that did away with extraterritoriality thus subjecting British nationals in Japan to Japanese law. The second was Japan’s 1895 victory over China in the First Sino-Japanese War, primarily a conflict over influence in Korea. The war demonstrated the failure of China’s Qing dynasty’s attempts to modernize its military and shifted the regional dominance from China to Japan.
In 1905, following the Russo-Japanese War, Itō was sent to Korea to negotiate a treaty that turned Korea into a Japanese protectorate. He returned to Korea as resident general in 1906 and pursued a gradual policy of economic and bureaucratic reform. Itō sought to suppress Korean nationalism and even engineered King Kojong’s abdication; however, he could not prevent the move favored by Japanese leaders to annex Korean. In October of 1909, Itō Hirobumi was assassinated in the city of Harbin, North China, by An Chung-gŭn, a member of the Korean Independence movement.
Itō Hirobumi was the one Japanese leader who advocated a moderate and sympathetic approach to Japan’s Korean policy; his assassination ultimately became a factor to Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910.
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
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.