What Would the World of Charlie Chaplin Look Like in Color?: Watch a Colorfully Restored Version of A Night at the Show (1915)

in Film | September 30th, 2020

When we imag­ine Char­lie Chap­lin, we imag­ine a man some­how exist­ing in black-and-white. The obvi­ous rea­son is that he became not just a movie star but a cul­tur­al icon in the 1910s and 20s, the era before sound came to the movies, let alone col­or. But to attain such suc­cess required skills tai­lored to the state of the medi­um at the time: that of mak­ing peo­ple laugh with­out say­ing a word, of course, but also of craft­ing an image instant­ly rec­og­niz­able in mono­chrome. Thus we don’t always feel we’re see­ing the “real” Char­lie Chap­lin in tech­ni­cal­ly more real­is­tic col­or pho­tographs, or even col­orized ones. But what would it feel like to watch one of his clas­sic come­dies in col­or?

You can find out by watch­ing the col­orized ver­sion of A Night in the Show above. Orig­i­nal­ly released in 1915, the 25-minute short was direct­ed by and stars Chap­lin, who plays the dual role of char­ac­ters called Mr. Pest and Mr. Row­dy. Both attend the same music-hall per­for­mance, and though Mr. Pest is of the upper crust and Mr. Row­dy is a work­ing man, both get equal­ly ine­bri­at­ed, their dis­parate social class­es pro­duc­ing dif­fer­ent styles of mis­chief-mak­ing.

The Eng­lish-born Chap­lin had pre­vi­ous­ly devel­oped these char­ac­ters on stage, hav­ing played the music-hall cir­cuit him­self since ado­les­cence. Safe to say that, by the time Hol­ly­wood came call­ing, he’d seen far worse than Pest and Row­dy him­self.

The qual­i­ty of this col­oriza­tion will per­haps not win the con­tro­ver­sial process any new con­verts, but it does give us a sense of what an evening at an Eng­lish music hall of the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry would actu­al­ly have looked like, a valu­able re-cre­ation now that none of us have mem­o­ries of this once-com­mon expe­ri­ence. We can more eas­i­ly imag­ine the kind of spec­ta­cles such estab­lish­ments would have offered, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to snake-charm­ing and bursts of fire, as well as its ram­shackle exag­ger­a­tions that Chap­lin so ener­get­i­cal­ly sat­i­rizes. We could also con­sid­er this his vale­dic­tion to that envi­ron­ment: the pre­vi­ous year’s-intro­duced the Tramp, who would go on to become his most beloved char­ac­ter of all, ensured that he would soon be able to put the music hall behind him for­ev­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

60+ Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

Col­orized Pho­tos Bring Walt Whit­man, Char­lie Chap­lin, Helen Keller & Mark Twain Back to Life

Char­lie Chap­lin Films a Scene Inside a Lion’s Cage in 200 Takes

Char­lie Chap­lin Does Cocaine and Saves the Day in Mod­ern Times (1936)

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

When Ted Turn­er Tried to Col­orize Cit­i­zen Kane: See the Only Sur­viv­ing Scene from the Great Act of Cin­e­mat­ic Sac­ri­lege

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Ella Fitzgerald Imitates Louis Armstrong’s Gravelly Voice While Singing “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby”

in Music | September 30th, 2020

Are great artists born, or are they made? Prob­a­bly a lit­tle of both, but I sus­pect that deep down, even if we don’t like to admit it, we know it’s prob­a­bly a lit­tle more the for­mer. We can become skilled at most any­thing with ded­i­ca­tion and hard work. Tal­ent is anoth­er matter—a mys­te­ri­ous com­bi­na­tion of qual­i­ties we know when we hear but can’t always define. Ella Fitzger­ald had it when she first stepped on stage on ama­teur night at Harlem’s Apol­lo The­ater as a teenag­er, intend­ing to do a tap dance rou­tine.

She’d only done the per­for­mance on a dare, had no for­mal train­ing out­side of singing in church, her bed­room, and the Harlem streets, and she only chose to sing that night because the act before her did a tap dance and stole her thun­der.

She blew the audi­ence away—a tough New York crowd not known for being forgiving—and ren­dered even the bois­ter­ous teenagers in the bal­cony speech­less. “Three encores lat­er,” she wrote, “the $25 prize was mine.” Fitzgerald’s gold­en, three-octave voice, impec­ca­ble tim­ing, and impro­vi­sa­tion­al bril­liance are not exact­ly the kinds of things that can be taught.

She didn’t look the part of the typ­i­cal female jazz singer, at least accord­ing to pop­u­lar per­cep­tion, writes Hol­ly Glea­son at NPR. “A large woman who’d grown up rough,” includ­ing time spent in a New York State refor­ma­to­ry, she was reject­ed by band­lead­ers even after that first, rev­e­la­to­ry per­for­mance, and the press fre­quent­ly referred to her in terms that dis­par­aged her appear­ance. “Fitzger­ald rec­og­nized she didn’t pos­sess Bil­lie Holiday’s torchy allure,” Hol­ly Glea­son writes, or “Eartha Kitt’s fer­al sen­su­al­i­ty or Car­men McRae’s sex appeal. But that would not stop the woman who took her vocal cues from the horns, as well as from jazz singer Con­nee Boswell.”

It did­n’t stop her from win­ning a Gram­my in the Gram­my’s first year, or hav­ing a record label, Verve, found­ed just to put out her music. Ella’s range and pitch-per­fect ear meant she could imi­tate not only the horn sec­tion or her favorite singer Boswell but just about any­one else as well, from pop­u­lar jazz singer Rose Mur­phy, with her high, car­toon­ish voice, “chee chee” affec­ta­tions, and “brrrp” tele­phone sound effects, to the low, grav­el­ly rasp of Fitzgerald’s long­time duet part­ner Louis Arm­strong. See her do exact­ly that in the clip at the top, mov­ing effort­less­ly in “I Can’t Give You Any­thing but Love, Baby” from her own voice, to Murphy’s, to Armstrong’s in the space of just a few min­utes.

What­ev­er obsta­cles Fitzger­ald faced, her voice seemed to soar above it all. In becom­ing a glob­al jazz star and “The First Lady of Song,” says jazz writer Will Fried­wald, “she showed peo­ple that this is music Amer­i­cans should be proud of.”

via Ben Phillips

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ella Fitzgerald’s Lost Inter­view about Racism & Seg­re­ga­tion: Record­ed in 1963, It’s Nev­er Been Heard Until Now

Ella Fitzger­ald Sings ‘Sum­mer­time’ by George Gersh­win, Berlin 1968

How Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Helped Break Ella Fitzger­ald Into the Big Time (1955)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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When R.E.M.‘s Michael Stipe Created the Lyrics for “The Voice of Harold” by Riffing on the Liner Notes of an Old Gospel Album (1983)

in Music | September 30th, 2020

R.E.M. is one of those bands that just think­ing about can send me into a rever­ie of mem­o­ries of the rooms of friends with whom I lis­tened to “Pret­ty Per­sua­sion,” “Rockville,” and the poet­ry of “7 Chi­nese Bros.”—one of Michael Stipe’s ear­ly, incom­pre­hen­si­ble songs, like “Swan Swan H,” whose cryp­tic lyrics one must seem­ing­ly take on faith. The song must mean some­thing, after all, to Stipe. Maybe the mys­tery of who, exact­ly, the “sev­en Chi­nese broth­ers swal­low­ing the ocean” were to him would be revealed some­day in an inter­view or stray ref­er­ence in a biog­ra­phy….

Now that we live in an age of instant infor­ma­tion grat­i­fi­ca­tion, we can skip the years of won­der and find the answer right away: the song was part­ly inspired, we learn at Song­facts, by a 1938 children’s book called The Five Chi­nese Broth­ers, based on a tra­di­tion­al folk tale of young broth­ers with super­nat­ur­al pow­ers. (It’s also part­ly a trib­ute to pho­tog­ra­ph­er Car­ol Levy, a friend who died in a car crash before the record­ing of Reck­on­ing.) Need­ing anoth­er syl­la­ble, maybe, Stipe changed the num­ber to sev­en, an odd­ly prophet­ic move giv­en that a new ver­sion of the sto­ry, pub­lished ten years lat­er, also fea­tured sev­en broth­ers.

The ref­er­ence shows how many great song­writ­ers work: pick­ing at bits and pieces from their mem­o­ries and what­ev­er cap­ti­vat­ing text hap­pens to be lay­ing around…. And Stipe is one of those singers, like Elton John, who can sell any line, no mat­ter how obscure or absurd.

In ear­ly songs, espe­cial­ly, he showed an uncan­ny abil­i­ty to invest incan­ta­to­ry com­bi­na­tions of words with haunt­ing pathos and urgency. He could sing from the phone book or the back of a cere­al box and make it com­pelling. In fact, the sto­ry of “7 Chi­nese Bros.” involves an almost sim­i­lar feat in the form of “Voice of Harold,” famil­iar to fans as the B‑side to “So. Cen­tral Rain” and part of the 1987 odds and ends col­lec­tion Dead Let­ter Office. What pos­si­ble expla­na­tion could there be for these non sequitur gospel lyrics, sung to the tune of… “7 Chi­nese Bros.”?

Was Stipe a secret Evan­ge­list, hop­ing to win con­verts by extolling “the pure tenor qual­i­ty of the voice of Harold Mont­gomery”? More teas­ing­ly vague themes emerge, along with ref­er­ences to fig­ures like the Rev­erend Bill Fun­der­burk, Charles Sur­ratt, John Bar­bee, and Rhon­da Mont­gomery (“That’s Rhon­da! An artist!”). Instead of “Sev­en Chi­nese broth­ers swal­low­ing the ocean,” the cho­rus intro­duces us to “The Rev­e­laires, A must / The Rev­e­laires / A must.” If you’re one of those who heard this song and thought, “What…?”, you can won­der no more.

The expla­na­tion comes to us from a 2009 inter­view pro­duc­er Don Dixon gave to Uncut mag­a­zine. (For some rea­son, Dixon refers to “7 Chi­nese Bros.” as “7 Chi­nese Blues,” nev­er a title of the song). The sto­ry begins with Stipe feel­ing down in the dumps in a stair­well out­fit­ted as a lounge for him in the stu­dio.

We were work­ing on the vocal for “7 Chi­nese Blues,” but Michael just was­n’t into it. He was down in his stair­well. I hit the talk-back to let him know I was com­ing through to make an adjust­ment… This was just an excuse to take a look at him, see if I could loosen him up a lit­tle. While I was in the attic, I’d noticed a stack of old records that had been tak­en up there to die, local R&B and gospel stuff most­ly. I grabbed the one off the top (a gospel record enti­tled The Joy of Know­ing Jesus by the Rev­e­laires) and as I passed Michael on the way to the Con­trol Room, I tossed it down to him. I thought he might be amused. When I fired up the tape a few sec­onds lat­er, Michael was singing, but not the lyrics to “7 Chi­nese Blues.” He was singing the lin­er notes to the LP I’d tossed him. When Michael began to sing these lin­er notes, he was much loud­er than he’d been ear­li­er and it took a few sec­onds for me to realise what was going on and adjust the lev­els. He made it all the way through the song, work­ing in every word on the back of that album! I rewound the tape, we had a chuck­le and pro­ceed­ed to sing the beau­ti­ful one-take vocal of the real words that you hear on Reck­on­ing. He seemed more con­fi­dent after that day.

Stipe didn’t just sing the words from the back of the album, he impro­vised cut-ups as he went, re-arrang­ing phras­es to fit the meter of the orig­i­nal song. “Voice of Harold” became a fan favorite for much the same rea­son as “7 Chi­nese Bros.” and “Swan Swan H”—it seemed to hide a mys­tery in plain view, its impas­sioned deliv­ery at odds with its non­sen­si­cal nar­ra­tive. Released after Reck­on­ing, it turns a spon­ta­neous moti­va­tion­al tool dur­ing the mak­ing of the album into a cre­ation all its own.

Jim Con­nel­ly explores the rela­tion­ship between “7 Chi­nese Bros.” and “Voice of Harold” even fur­ther in a post at Medi­alop­er, point­ing to the firm con­vic­tion that’s so “chill-induc­ing” in the lat­ter (and that comes through in the for­mer record­ing, made imme­di­ate­ly after­ward). They may be found words, serendip­i­tous­ly picked up and put togeth­er on the spot, but in Stipe’s voice we can tell that “He’s real. He means it,” what­ev­er the hell it is. See a video of “Voice of Harold” with lyrics, at the top, and fol­low along with the lin­er notes on the back of Rev­e­laires’ gospel album The Joy of Know­ing Jesus just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” Michael Stipe Pro­claims Again, and He Still Feels Fine

Why R.E.M.’s 1991 Out of Time May Be the “Most Polit­i­cal­ly Impor­tant Album” Ever

R.E.M.’s “Los­ing My Reli­gion” Reworked from Minor to Major Scale

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Mulan Re-Disneyfied: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#62) Discussion with Actor Michael Tow

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | September 30th, 2020

Is the new Mulan the equiv­a­lent for Asian-Amer­i­cans what Black Pan­ther was for African-Amer­i­cans? The largest enter­tain­ment machine we have fea­tured an all-Asian cast telling a tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese sto­ry aimed at the widest pos­si­ble audi­ence. Did it work?

Actor Michael Tow joins your hosts Eri­ca Spyres, Mark Lin­sen­may­er, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss the devel­op­ment, aes­thet­ics, and polit­i­cal con­tro­ver­sies sur­round­ing the film. The vision of fem­i­nism changed between the orig­i­nal poem from ca. 550 C.E. (“When the two rab­bits run side by side, how can you tell the female from the male?”) to the present, and the “just be you” eth­ic (with your mag­i­cal chi!) is not the norm for Chi­na in any peri­od. Was the project in its very con­cep­tion doomed to fall short of some of its goals? Was the live-action an improve­ment over the 1998 ani­mat­ed ver­sion?

Read the poem, and watch a read­ing of the illus­trat­ed 1998 Robert San Souci book Fa Mulan that the films were based on. There have been many adap­ta­tions of the sto­ry in Chi­na.

Oth­er sources we read to pre­pare includ­ed:

Fol­low Michael on Twit­ter @michaelctow and check out his imdb cred­its. Michael host­ed a Q&A with the Mulan cast short­ly after the film’s release.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts

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Explore the Codex Zouche-Nuttall: A Rare, Accordion-Folded Pre-Columbian Manuscript

in History | September 29th, 2020

In the past two decades, the Latin Amer­i­can world has seen a tremen­dous resur­gence of indige­nous lan­guage study and lit­er­a­ture. Some Mex­i­can writ­ers are “ditch­ing Span­ish,” Dora Ballew writes, for “Zapotec, Tzotzil, Mayan and oth­er lan­guages spo­ken long before Euro­peans washed up on the shores of what is now Mex­i­co.” Large antholo­gies of such lit­er­a­ture have been pub­lished since 2001. The move is not a recov­ery of lost lan­guages and cul­tures, but an affir­ma­tion of “the num­ber of peo­ple flu­ent in both an indige­nous lan­guage and Span­ish,” schol­ars and writ­ers Earl and Sylvia Shorris explain.

“At least sev­er­al mil­lion” indige­nous lan­guage speak­ers in Mex­i­co alone ensure that “lit­er­a­ture has ample place in which to flour­ish.” Despite the incur­sions of both the Aztecs, then the Span­ish, speak­ers of Mix­tec, for exam­ple, sur­vived and now “inhab­it a vast ter­ri­to­ry of broad moun­tain ranges and small val­leys that stretch across the mod­ern-day states of Puebla, Guer­rero and Oax­a­ca,” writes Dr. Manuel A. Her­mann Lejarazu.

An expert on Mix­tec codices, Lejarazu ties the con­tem­po­rary cul­ture of Mix­tec speak­ing peo­ple back to the Post­clas­sic past, “a peri­od between the tenth and six­teenth cen­turies when polit­i­cal cen­tres pro­lif­er­at­ed, fill­ing the vac­u­um left after the col­lapse of large cities estab­lished in pre­ced­ing cen­turies.”

Much of the lit­tle that is known of the indige­nous Mix­tec lit­er­ary cul­ture comes from the Codex Zouche-Nut­tall, one of only a hand­ful of pre-Columbian man­u­scripts in exis­tence. Made of deer skin, the codex “con­tains two nar­ra­tives,” the British Muse­um notes. “One side of the doc­u­ment relates the his­to­ry of impor­tant cen­tres in the Mix­tec region, while the oth­er, start­ing at the oppo­site end, records the geneal­o­gy, mar­riages and polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary feats of the Mix­tec ruler, Eight Deer Jaguar-Claw.”

Although fin­ished around 1556, the pic­to­graph­ic fold­ing man­u­script “is con­sid­ered to be of pre-His­pan­ic ori­gin,” Lejarazu writes, “since it pre­serves a strong indige­nous tra­di­tion in its pic­to­graph­ic tech­niques, with no demon­stra­ble Euro­pean influ­ence.” The codex was first dis­cov­ered in 1854 in a Domini­can monastery in Flo­rence. It’s unclear exact­ly how and when it arrived in Europe, but sev­er­al such codices “reached the Old World as gifts or as part of the doc­u­ments sub­mit­ted to Span­ish courts that han­dled legal mat­ters in the Indies.”

Though sev­ered from its ori­gins, the Codex Zouche-Nut­tall is now freely avail­able online in a scanned 1902 fac­sim­i­le edi­tion at the British Muse­um and the Inter­net Archive. You can learn much more about these incred­i­bly rare doc­u­ments from Lejarazu’s arti­cle and Robert Lloyd Williams’ Com­plete Codex Zouche-Nutall, which explains how the pic­to­graph­ic record func­tions like a sto­ry­board, or out­line, for a com­plex nar­ra­tive tra­di­tion that tied Mix­tec rulers to the gods, to each oth­er, and to the past and future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Native Lands: An Inter­ac­tive Map Reveals the Indige­nous Lands on Which Mod­ern Nations Were Built

Speak­ing in Whis­tles: The Whis­tled Lan­guage of Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co

Peru­vian Schol­ar Writes & Defends the First The­sis Writ­ten in Quechua, the Main Lan­guage of the Incan Empire

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Storyboarding Works: A Brief Introduction to How Ridley Scott, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson & Other Directors Storyboard Their Films

in Art, Film | September 29th, 2020

When you’re mak­ing a film with com­plex shots or sequences of shots, it does­n’t hurt to have sto­ry­boards. Though pro­fes­sion­al sto­ry­board artists do exist, they don’t come cheap, and in any case they con­sti­tute one more play­er in the game of tele­phone between those who’ve envi­sioned the final cin­e­mat­ic prod­uct and the col­lab­o­ra­tors essen­tial to real­iz­ing it. It thus great­ly behooves aspir­ing direc­tors to devel­op their draw­ing skills, though you hard­ly need to be a full-fledged drafts­man like Rid­ley Scott or even a pro­fi­cient com­ic artist like Bong Joon-ho for your work to ben­e­fit from sto­ry­board­ing.

You do, how­ev­er, need to under­stand the lan­guage of sto­ry­board­ing, essen­tial­ly a means of trans­lat­ing the rich lan­guage of cin­e­ma into fig­ures (stick fig­ures if need be), rec­tan­gles, and arrows — lots of arrows. Draw­ing on exam­ples from Star Wars and Juras­sic Park to Taxi Dri­ver and The Big Lebows­ki, the Rock­etJump Film School video above explains how sto­ry­boards work in less than ten min­utes.

As sto­ry­board artist Kevin Sen­za­ki explains how these draw­ings visu­al­ize a film in advance of and as a guide for film­mak­ing process, we see a vari­ety of sto­ry­boards rang­ing from crude sketch­es to near­ly com­ic book-lev­el detail, all com­pared to cor­re­spond­ing clips from the fin­ished pro­duc­tion.

These exam­ples come from the work of such direc­tors as Alfred Hitch­cock, Mar­tin Scors­ese, James Cameron, Wes Ander­son, and Christo­pher Nolan — all of whose films, you’ll notice, have no slight visu­al ambi­tions. When a shot or sequence requires seri­ous visu­al effects work, or even when a cam­era has to make just the right move to advance the action, sto­ry­boards are prac­ti­cal­ly essen­tial. Not that every suc­cess­ful direc­tor uses them: no less an auteur than Wern­er Her­zog has called sto­ry­boards “the instru­ments of the cow­ards,” those who can’t han­dle the spon­tane­ity of either film­mak­ing or life itself. Rather, he tells aspir­ing direc­tors to “read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read… read, read… read.” But then so did Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, who did­n’t just draw his movies in advance — he paint­ed them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rid­ley Scott Demys­ti­fies the Art of Sto­ry­board­ing (and How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Project)

How the Coen Broth­ers Sto­ry­board­ed Blood Sim­ple Down to a Tee (1984)

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Paint­ed the Sto­ry­boards For Scenes in His Epic Films: Com­pare Can­vas to Cel­lu­loid

How Bong Joon-ho’s Sto­ry­boards for Par­a­site (Now Pub­lished as a Graph­ic Nov­el) Metic­u­lous­ly Shaped the Acclaimed Film

The Art of Mak­ing Blade Run­ner: See the Orig­i­nal Sketch­book, Sto­ry­boards, On-Set Polaroids & More

Down­load New Sto­ry­board­ing Soft­ware That’s Free & Open Source

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Story Behind the Iconic Photograph of 11 Construction Workers Lunching 840 Feet Above New York City (1932)

in Architecture, History, Photography, Video - Arts & Culture | September 28th, 2020

Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Moth­er”…

Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-win­ning “The Ter­ror of War”…

Richard Drew’s “The Falling Man”…

Through­out the years, a num­ber of icon­ic pho­tographs have tapped into the col­lec­tive uncon­scious, shap­ing our view of his­toric events, some­times to a degree that leads to social change.

These images are not depen­dent on know­ing the sub­jects’ iden­ti­ties, though it’s always inter­est­ing when more con­text leaks out, often as the result of some seri­ous sleuthing by reporters, archivists, or oth­er inter­est­ed par­ties.

1932’s “Lunch atop a Sky­scraper (New York Con­struc­tion Work­ers Lunch­ing on a Cross­beam)” is one of the lighter-heart­ed pho­tos to cre­ate such a last­ing pub­lic impres­sion.

Eleven work­ers are depict­ed enjoy­ing their break, relax­ing on a gird­er a dizzy­ing 840-feet above New York City, unbur­dened by safe­ty har­ness­es or oth­er pro­tec­tive gear.

In the words of Rock­e­feller Cen­ter archivist Christi­na Rous­sel, who nar­rates the TIME Mag­a­zine 100 Pho­tos episode above, they are the “unsung heroes of con­struc­tion.”

The unusu­al des­ig­na­tion may lead you to rack your brains for a sung hero of con­struc­tion.

Grandpa’s cog-in-the-wheel con­tri­bu­tion to the erec­tion of an icon­ic land­mark can be a source of anec­do­tal pride for fam­i­lies, but it rarely leads to greater renown.

Loom­ing over this image is John D. Rock­e­feller, Jr, who mas­ter­mind­ed a 22 acre com­plex of 14 com­mer­cial build­ings in the Art Deco style. The project was a boost to the econ­o­my dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, employ­ing over 250,000 people—from truck­ers and quar­ry­men to glaziers and steel­work­ers and hun­dreds of oth­er jobs in between. It cre­at­ed an enor­mous amount of good­will and patri­ot­ic pride.

The Rock­e­feller orga­ni­za­tion cap­i­tal­ized on this pos­i­tive recep­tion, with a steady stream of staged pub­lic­i­ty pho­tos, includ­ing the dar­ing eleven shar­ing a nose­bleed seat on what was to become the 69th floor of the RCA Build­ing (now known as 30 Rock.)

As film crit­ic John Ander­son, review­ing the doc­u­men­tary Men at Lunch in The New York Times, wrote:

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of the pic­ture, which has been col­orized, sat­i­rized, bur­lesqued with the Mup­pets and turned into a life-size sculp­ture by Ser­gio Furnari, is part­ly about the casu­al reck­less­ness of its sub­jects: The beam on which they sit seems sus­pend­ed over an urban abyss, with the vast­ness of Cen­tral Park spread out behind them and noth­ing, seem­ing­ly below. But in fact a fin­ished floor of 30 Rock­e­feller Plaza was prob­a­bly just a few feet away.

The doc­u­men­tary helped con­firm the iden­ti­ties of sev­er­al of the men.

Irish immi­grants Mad­dy O’Shaughnessy and Son­ny Glynn hold down either end, as ver­i­fied by their sons.

William Eck­n­er, third from left, and Joe Cur­tis, third from right, were named in a sim­i­lar­ly spir­it­ed anno­tat­ed pho­to tak­en around the same time.

The man seat­ed to Cur­tis’ right may or may not be John Charles Cook of the St. Reg­is Mohawk Reser­va­tion.

The photographer’s iden­ti­ty is also debat­able. It’s most often cred­it­ed to Charles C. Ebbets but Tom Kel­ley and William Left­wich were also on hand that day, leather satchels of glass plates slung across their backs, as they, too, defied grav­i­ty, doc­u­ment­ing the com­ple­tion of archi­tect Ray­mond Hood’s mas­ter plan.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Dorothea Lange Shot, Migrant Moth­er, Per­haps the Most Icon­ic Pho­to in Amer­i­can His­to­ry

Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Hand-Colored Maps of Wealth & Poverty in Victorian London: Explore a New Interactive Edition of Charles Booth’s Historic Work of Social Cartography (1889)

in History, Maps | September 28th, 2020

Map­ping has always been con­tentious, no mat­ter where you look in time. Maps pre­serve ide­o­log­i­cal assump­tions on paper, ratio­nal­iz­ing phys­i­cal space as they ren­der it in two dimen­sions. No mat­ter how didac­tic, they can become polit­i­cal weapons. In the case of Charles Booth’s visu­al­ly impres­sive Maps Descrip­tive of Lon­don Pover­ty, we have a series of maps whose own assump­tions can some­times seem at odds with their osten­si­ble pur­pose: to improve the liv­ing con­di­tions of London’s poor.

Booth’s “colour­ful pover­ty maps were cre­at­ed between 1886 and 1903,” Zoe Craig writes at Lon­don­ist, as part of a “ground-break­ing study into the lives of ordi­nary Lon­don­ers.” A phil­an­thropist born into wealth in the ship­ping trade, Booth took it upon him­self to study pover­ty in Lon­don in order to ini­ti­ate social reforms.

He suc­ceed­ed. The study, con­duct­ed by Booth and a team of researchers, led to the cre­ation of Old Age pen­sions, which Booth called “lim­it­ed social­ism,” as well as school meals for hun­gry chil­dren. He was clear about that fact that he saw such reforms as a bul­wark against social­ist rev­o­lu­tion.

The study’s sev­en­teen vol­umes are filled with pic­turesque accounts. “Pick­ing through the tid­bits of infor­ma­tion from these people’s lives will make you feel a bit like a Vic­to­ri­an cos­tume dra­ma police detec­tive,” Craig remarks. This ref­er­ence to polic­ing feels point­ed, giv­en the role of the police in main­tain­ing class hier­ar­chies in Vic­to­ri­an Lon­don. As an Amer­i­can, it can be hard to look at Booth’s map and not also see the 20th redlin­ing prac­tices in U.S. cities. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the cat­e­gories Booth applied to London’s class­es:

Called ‘Inquiry Into the Life and Labour of the Peo­ple in Lon­don’, the epic work stud­ied fam­i­lies and res­i­dents liv­ing across Lon­don, and coloured the streets accord­ing to their finan­cial sit­u­a­tion: between black for ‘low­est class, vicious, semi-crim­i­nal’ through pink for mixed ‘some com­fort­able, some poor’ to orange for ‘wealthy’.

As in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s pater­nal­is­tic 1965 report on the Black under­class in the U.S., the lan­guage rein­forces Social Dar­win­ist ideas that deem the “low­est class” unfit for full par­tic­i­pa­tion in civ­il society—“vicious, semi-crim­i­nal…”

Of course, the social and his­tor­i­cal con­text dif­fers marked­ly, but we might also con­sid­er Fear­gus O’Sullivan’s obser­va­tions at Bloomberg City­Lab. A new pub­lished edi­tion of the map, he writes, “accom­pa­nied by com­pelling if bleak peri­od pho­tos, reveals a city that pos­sess­es echoes of Lon­don today. It depicts, after all, a dense­ly-packed metrop­o­lis with a cos­mopoli­tan pop­u­la­tion where immense­ly wealthy peo­ple lived just around the cor­ner from neigh­bors who were strug­gling to make ends meet.”

Maps may not cre­ate the social con­di­tions they describe, but they can help per­pet­u­ate them, ren­der­ing peo­ple vis­i­ble in ways that allow for even more con­trol over their lives. Crit­i­cisms of Booth’s study claimed that not only did the pro­posed reforms not go far enough but that the report described London’s class struc­ture while offer­ing lit­tle to no analy­sis of the caus­es of pover­ty. In lan­guage that sound­ed less objec­tion­able to Vic­to­ri­an ears, the poor are most­ly blamed for their own con­di­tion.

None of the study’s par­tic­u­lar lim­i­ta­tions take away from the graph­ic achieve­ments of its maps and explana­to­ry charts. They are, the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics writes, a strik­ing “ear­ly exam­ple of social car­tog­ra­phy.” The LSE hosts an incred­i­bly detailed, search­able, high-res­o­lu­tion inter­ac­tive ver­sion of the maps, assem­bled togeth­er and over­laid on a mod­ern GPS map of Lon­don. They also detail the var­i­ous edi­tions of the maps as they appeared between 1898 and 1903.

Hand-col­ored and based on the 1869 Ord­nance Sur­vey, the maps seemed “suf­fi­cient­ly impor­tant” to Booth to war­rant “com­pre­hen­sive revi­sion.” Here, the police appear in per­son to guide the process. “Social inves­ti­ga­tors accom­pa­nied police­men on their beats across Lon­don,” the LSE writes, “and record­ed their own impres­sions of each street and the com­ments of the police­men.” You can read the police note­books from these sur­veys at the LSE and learn more about the 12 dis­trict maps and the demo­graph­ic data they rep­re­sent at Map­ping Lon­don. The LSE print­ed a hard­cov­er print edi­tion of Booth’s work in 2019, com­plete with 500 illus­tra­tions. You can pur­chase a copy here. Or vis­it the inter­ac­tive edi­tion here.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 1855 Map That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Dis­ease Pre­ven­tion & Data Visu­al­iza­tion: Dis­cov­er John Snow’s Broad Street Pump Map

Ani­ma­tions Visu­al­ize the Evo­lu­tion of Lon­don and New York: From Their Cre­ation to the Present Day

Syn­chro­nized, Time­lapse Video Shows Train Trav­el­ing from Lon­don to Brighton in 1953, 1983 & 2013

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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