2nd Blog Birthday

Today marks two years since the first post of this blog appeared.

The start was slow, daily pageview tallies were in the 40-80 range for the first six months. But the pace picked up and now pageview counts are nicely in the 1,000-1,500 range (viewing drops off around any Saturday) and the cumulative amount as of this posting is about 360,000.

It's getting to the point where I'll allow advertising. That will make both Google and my wife happy and will help subsidize the research that goes into many of the posts you read here.

So a hearty thank you to all you readers, be you regulars or occasionals, for motivating me to keep the blog rolling.

Behind the Scenes

The photo above is of a corner of the small, former bedroom that I use as both a library and painting studio (most of my art-related books are on the wall opposite the one shown).

As I've mentioned from time to time, I majored in commercial art as an undergraduate and took a number of drawing and painting classes wherein the instructors were careful not to teach us much for fear of destroying our "creativity." After college, I dropped art to do other things that probably paid better. A few years ago I took up painting again. This was mostly because I was curious as to whether or not I might have been any good at it had I received any real instruction.

My main source of instruction is books, supplemented by visits to art museums and an occasional free demonstration at a local artists paint manufacturer. But it's all really a back-burner activity; I seldom paint, devoting my energy to studying art and writing about it.

If you look carefully, you'll notice that the paints I'm using are acrylics. That's because they are more convenient to use than the messier, slow-drying oils that would probably work better for me were I a serious painter.

I'm still experimenting with styles as the three paintings in the photo indicate. My subjects tend to be pretty girls because (1) I like attractive females and (2) people are the most difficult subjects to paint because viewers can immediately detect errors, so this is a challenge. (When seeing a painting of an unfamiliar landscape, viewers have little means for telling whether or not the artist got things right. But people have seen various kinds of other people throughout their lives and therefore have a pretty good idea what's right and wrong about an image.)

The lowest painting is adapted from a black-and-white photo of 1930s actress Jean Harlow; I made no effort to duplicate it, though it is similar to the original. The middle one is from my imagination. The one on the easel was begun using a black-and-white photo of 1960s actress Ursula Andress; I liked the pose and needed a nice light and shade reference. But as you can see, I painted an imaginary face bearing little detailed relationship to Andress.

Enough about my hack work; now back to our usual programming....

Artist's Name = Widespread Expression

When an artist becomes famous, the nature of that fame usually resides in the images of his work in public's mind. This is different from the fame of movie stars, actors, fashion models and others whose physical appearance is the leading "hook" for public grasping. A few artists are generally recognized by their appearance as well as their work, examples being van Gogh, Lautrec, Picasso and Warhol.

Then there is the odd case where the artist's subject matter becomes a concept that, in turn, is given the artist's name by the public. It's an odd path to artistic immortality, but there it is.

As an American, I naturally think of the Rube Goldberg machine, an elaborate, illogical sequence of odd connections that results in an outcome that could easily have been reached by simpler means.

Above is an example of a Rube Goldberg device and here is the Wikipedia entry for Goldberg who it seems earned an engineering degree from the University of California (Berkeley) before taking up the cartoonist's pen.

If I were British, I would use the term Heath Robinson to refer to the same sort of thing. Below is an example and here is his entry.

Robinson came from a family of illustrators and could whip up some nice, straight work in that field as well as his gizmo cartoons.

I don't know the inner thoughts of Goldberg and Robinson regarding the nature of their fame. But fame of a nice sort is rare, and if I had been them, I'd be happy to accept it.

Blogging Note

You might have noticed that my response to comments has been slower and weaker than usual. That's because I've been traveling for most of the last two weeks. The posts you've been reading were written earlier and queued for scheduled later release. I'm writing this in artsy Taos, New Mexico and will post about it if I see anything interesting enough to merit doing so.

Fifty That Changed the World -- A Tiny Bit

A pet project of London design icon Terence Conran is the Design Museum (Wikipedia entry here and web site here).

It's not far off the tourist track, being located across the Thames and a short ways downstream from the Tower of London (walk across the Tower Bridge and hang a left (sort of -- you have to zig and zag a little to get back to the riverside).

I bring this up as incidental background to the series of books the museum produced over the last few years. The graphic at the top of this post shows covers of four of them. Their titles can be generalized as "Fifty Xxxxs That Changed the World" where the "Xxxxs" is Dresses, Bags, Chairs, Hats, Shoes and Cars.

The books are small in format and short in pages. There is a skimpy introduction and the fifty selections are presented in spreads -- text on the left-hand page and an illustration on the right.

But what seriously bothers me is the Changed the World business.

I see this phrase far more often than it merits. A case can be made that anything changes the world in some degree by its presence, absence or actions. But that trivializes the concept to the point of uselessness. At the other extreme might be strike by an asteroid or large meteor. Most of us would agree that the Great War and World War 2 changed the world, as did the domestication of the horse and fire, the invention of the wheel and the airplane, and other events that affected the lives of millions.

But handbags? dresses? hats? C'mon; don't be silly. A more accurate title might be "Fifty Xxxxs That Are Pretty Interesting."

As an aside, there are those admonitions that are usually directed towards naive youth. Major in this or that subject in university, get a job in such-and-such field and you, too, can Change the World! If I ever get the power to Change the World, one of the first things I'll do is abolish that phrase.

Artists With Rare Last Initials

In this post we are now getting oh-so-close to something like numerology. But hey! -- it's late August and blog readers are probably off on vacation, so why not write a truly inconsequential post while waiting for their return?

I was glancing over the part of my bookshelves containing books about individual artists and noted that I had none for last names staring with "N" and only one staring with "O" (Thornton Oakley, if you're curious). Later that day I was in Barnes & Noble and passed by their books sorted by artist's name and saw none for "N." Hmm.

I found this item noting that N and O respectively ranked seventh and fifth in terms of citations in the 11th edition of the "Concise Oxford Dictionary," 2004 revision. So those letters seem to be popular enough so far as English words are concerned.

But when it comes to names as recorded in the 2000 U.S. census we find that N ranks 16th and O 18th with respective percentages of 1.65 and 1.39. The letter "M" is in first place at 10.48 percent, which makes it about seven times as common as N and O.

Data for other countries would obviously differ. For example, "V" ranks 19th in the report linked above, but surely would rank far higher in the Netherlands.

Another potential research problem is that many artists are not known by their given and family names. This is especially true for Italians where first names and nicknames are the monickers that often stick in art history.

All that aside, were my casual bookshelf observations all that far off?

Probably not. I skimmed through the "Oxford Concise Dictionary of Art & Artists" (Third Edition) making a rough tally of artists mentioned in biographical paragraphs (including passing mentions of relatives of the primary artist who also practiced art). My counts for N and O were 37 and 32 while M tallied at 170 (not counting artists known as "The Master of ..."). So M was about five times as common as N and O.

My copy of Walter Reed's "The Illustrator in America 1860-2000" (2001) has an index of artists. Its M-N-O block tallies are 43, six and ten, so M's are about five and a half times more common than N's and O's -- similar to the other results.

Conclusion? Artists with last names beginning with the letters N and O are not common. But it's because such last names are comparatively rare and not some cosmic connection between name and artistic success.

Blogging Note

This is to let you know about two changes I made to this blog's infrastructure.

At the top of the left-hand panel is a Google search tool for locating posts containing the item you specify.

And, assuming I didn't screw things up (I can't test this feature from my computers), I dropped comment screening for recent (up to 14 days) comments. I replaced it with the gizmo that asks you to copy letters into an edit box to verify you're a human being and not a spam-bot. This should result in your comment appearing almost immediately.

I hope you find these changes useful.

Was Helen Worth All That Bother?

Helen of Troy, legends have it, was the most beautiful woman of her day who was the spark that set off the Trojan war. Actually it gets pretty complicated, as the Wikipedia link above indicates, but we'll go with the beautiful part.

Many artists over the years found it hard to resist the appeal of painting the most beautiful woman in the world, so "portraits" of Helen abound. A few are shown below along with some actresses who portrayed her in movies.

Gallery

The Abduction of Helen of Troy - Cesare Dandini (1596-1657)

Paris and Helen - J-L David - 1788

By Frederick Sandys - c.1867

By Sir Edward Poynter - 1881

By Evelyn De Morgan - 1898

The Private Life of Helen of Troy - book cover

Maria Corda in The Private Life of Helen of Troy - 1927

Rossana Podesta as Helen - 1956

Diane Kruger as Helen - 2004

I find it interesting that Helen often seems to be a blonde or otherwise has light brown or red hair (Poynter's version is an exception). I've never gone nuts over blondes (though I have nothing against them). But the artists who did choose to depict her as blonde almost surely had that preference.

What we have here is a demonstration of subjectivity in art. Clearly the casting directors and painters strained to select an appearance that was to represent the ultimate in female beauty. (Okay, I'm not so sure about Sandy's scowling redhead.) Yet these Helens differ. And even though they differ, there's not one I'd be inclined to abduct and haul off to Troy. However, if she had dark hair and gray eyes ....

So Government Sponsored Art is Necessary?

Here it is early August. Our postman is less burdened because junk mail mailers, knowing from experience that response rates are low during high summer, send out less junk mail. Blog-wise, this is a Friday post and experience has shown me that readership drops off for the weekend right about now and doesn't pick up until well into Sunday.

Doldrums time, in other words.

So I'll take advantage of the situation to write about something hardly anyone will be around to read: government-funded art.

Yesterday morning's Seattle Times editorial page offered this op-ed column titled "Disappearing federal funding for the arts threatens American soul" by a fellow named David Hahn who is identified as "a composer who lives in Seattle."

Hahn begins his piece with a few odd sketches of presumably imaginary just-folks artsy people who are already marginalized in American society. Following that is a riff about how the Roman Catholic Church (not a government, though some states were headed by clergy) funded all kinds of wonderful art-related things in centuries past. Then he comes to the crux of his meandering piece which I quote below to preserve in case the link disappears.

Art is not to be reserved for rich patrons. Somewhere there is a gardener who loves avant-garde jazz, a bus driver who loves opera, a cop who digs ballet and even takes dancing lessons, and a hotel service worker who spends her free evenings at the theater. Art answers questions about our condition, perhaps not directly, but in the way we individually relate and react to it.

Croatia, a country that has a per capita GDP that is half that of South Carolina, is willing and able to support scores of independent artists including actors, musicians, painters and filmmakers. These people are provided a salary on which they can live and in return, they are asked to pursue their arts — adorning the state and providing art for the people.

The United States has different priorities. More often than not, publicly funded art is the object of congressmen's ire and attempts to dissolve the already poorly funded National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA, with a $150 million budget, can use funds for only a very few arts groups, but at least the department is a symbol saying: "America cares for the arts." Given today's radical state of the budget debate in Congress, the NEA will likely soon be dissolved.

With the recent promises of budget cuts, the arts will again be undermined. The power and vital importance of the arts not only for our economy but for our individual and collective soul is being crushed.

While it's nice to be given the impression that artists are owed a living from taxpayers, perhaps a pause is in order to look what we are getting for our generosity. The public art pictured below for the most part probably wasn't funded by the federal government -- not directly, anyway. But it is the sort of public art we seem to get regardless of what level of government funds it.

Gallery

By Paul Horiuchi for 1962 Seattle world's fair

At a new light rail station

Under approach to University Bridge

At Seattle Center (the old world's fair grounds)

On University of Washington campus

Even I, contrarian that I claim to be, do not think all public art is bad; that Augustus Saint-Gaudens fellow cranked out some nice things from time to time.

But most of the public art I see nowadays strikes me as a waste of money. Contra Hahn, if the art shown above had never been created, I doubt that any poor, artsy soul would have been crushed by such non-events. And as for my poor, delicate, artsy soul? It gets crushed daily by the sort of expensive, pointless, publicly funded art that continues to pile up around town.

Blogging Note

This post is for blogging and software geeks, and not necessarily for art-oriented readers.

Regular readers probably notice that I've had to suggest double-clicking on images to both enlarge and improve quality. The quality factor puzzled me because, at 2Blowhards, I always got clear images, provided the source image was fine. I also knew that other blogs on Blogspot had nice, clear large images. What was I doing wrong?

It turns out that it was my my error: I was adjusting the Blogger software produced HTML code without adjusting everything necessary to preserve quality.

Default Blogger takes images and sizes them to a set maximum. Because this blog focuses on images, I want them larger than what Blogger was providing. So I go into the HTML code and resize images to suit my needs. Often, the result was a bubbly appearance. Finally I shrugged off my habitual torpor and discovered that the Blogger-generated code included, buried in four or five lines of image-specific code, this: "s320" -- which seems to be a secondary size specification. And by changing s320 to s640 I could get clear images.

So from here on, s640 it is. I also went back and modified the HTML for some of the most popular older posts and I'll do others as time and inclination permit.

Apologies for not dealing with this problem sooner.

Anniversary

Today marks one year since my first post here at Art Contrarian.

For a while I cross-posted material at 2Blowhards.com. But eventually Ray Sawhill, after some consultation with me and perhaps other interested parties, decided to close it down as an active site; it's still on the Internet, but new posting has ceased.

I started Art Contrarian figuring that I couldn't maintain 2Blowhards by myself, and that the blog had lost its zip when Ray "retired" from it. I made two formative decisions regarding the new blog. First, I wanted to keep politics out of it as much as possible (though I knew this would reduce commentary considerably). Second, I wanted to reduce posting to a level that I could manage without it dominating my real life. The result is a Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting schedule, though most posts are written about a week in advance and stockpiled for later release.

I'm pleased with the results. Especially pleased that readership has increased about eightfold since the early months. Thank you for visiting: I appreciate your interest in what's going on here.

I Saw the La Quinta Arts Festival -- And Survived!

I'm in the Palm Springs, California area while my wife is watching the tennis tournament at Indian Wells. I'm not at all into that game, so I'm keeping busy writing data display programs for my former employer (as a part-time employee till the end of June).

Saturday I took a break from the J computer language to take in the La Quinta Arts Festival, an event the sponsors tout as Number Three in the USA.

I don't often do art fairs because usually I don't find much of interest. But as I mentioned, I needed some diversion, so I arrived early to find a free parking lot, grabbed a coffee and Wall Street Journal at a fine coffee house in the Old Town, then waited in line and finally plunked down the $12 admission fee to enter. I spent about an hour there and took some photos to document what I saw. A selection is below.

The artists came from as far north as Washington's San Juan Islands and as far east as Florida. I estimate that most fall into the category of having some gallery representation, yet have yet to become well-known to the art consumption public. The quality was a notch above what one might find at a local art fair, so someone with a four-figure budget wanting a nice decorative piece for the family room could do well at the La Quinta.

Gallery

This is the setting -- a park in the La Quinta Old Town near City Hall. Those white tents house each artist's wares.

There were sculpture, woodwork, photography and other items besides paintings.

Some painting was abstract. I think the ones pictured here would make a decent decoration in an appropriately furnished room.

This artist seems to be able to supply several genres, but nothing that lit my fire.

This group is cartoony and rather silly, so far as I'm concerned. I wonder who buys this stuff and, more importantly, why.

If Botero can make a mint painting fat people, others will be willing to enter that game.

On the more representational side, here in desert country paintings of Indians can sell.

The artist in this tent does it all with palette knives; I saw him at work on a new painting. Poor me, I lack the imagination to appreciate what he's doing. I understand using a knife to do bits of a painting where appropriate. But the whole thing? ... Sorta like inscribing the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin; a marvel of sorts, but to what other purpose?

The French Impressionists made purple shadows respectable. This artist uses them a whole lot. This inspires me to write a post, but not necessarily about shadows.

Here is Michael Situ's tent. He tells me he's no relation of the increasingly famous Mian Situ, though both work out of the Laguna Beach area. That might be his wife in the foreground. The paintings are mostly plein air studies, but very nice and more finished than studies often tend to be.

Lacking Skills? - Here are Some Arts for You

I suppose it's nice to be one of those souls who don't mind making fools of themselves. Me? -- I try my best to avoid doing anything where my abilities are below average unless the outcome is so important that I'm willing to grit my teeth and suffer the learning curve.

Fortunately for we the talentless, American culture has degenerated to the point where one doesn't have to be skilled in order to participate or even succeed in fields of endeavor that are called "arts" -- the expansion of the definition of that term might be yet another symptom of our decline, but I'll leave that matter for another time.

Consider the following items.

Some hold teaching to be a kind of applied art. I'd call it a craft, but let's go along with the notion that there can be an art to it. Primary and secondary school teachers for the most part cannot get their jobs unless they have had a certain amount of training and practice in teaching. Presumably, therefore, they have acquired a set of teaching-related skills before becoming professional teachers.

On the other hand, most people who teach in universities lack any training in pedagogy: all they need is a Ph.D. in a field of specialization. Or perhaps not even that. As a graduate student, I had to lead "quiz sections" for an introductory Sociology course. I knew zilch about how to teach: whatever knowledge I had of teaching was from the perspective of having been a student for many, many years. I'm convinced I seriously short-changed all those super-sharp Ivy League students, including one who was the daughter of a sitting Supreme Court justice.

Literature is considered an art, though it can be difficult to pin down where it leaves off and ordinary writing begins. And writing itself doesn't require training beyond the set of skills required to make one considered "literate." Sure, there are college courses dealing with writing not to mention writers' workshops and the like. Yet none of these purportedly advanced forms of training are essential to becoming a writer of some sort. After all, just about anyone can start his own blog: I did.

Then there is dancing. The highfalutin' form is The Dance, but up until the mid-1950s even ordinary social dancing required the ability to execute dance steps. These included the waltz three-beat step, the four-beat foxtrot step and others. And there were "fad" dances that popped up every few years. Somebody would concoct a set of dance steps and perhaps other actions, come up with a catchy song extolling the dance and then hope both the song and the dance would become popular.

Nowadays, unless you are into Serious Tango or something similar, going dancing usually means dealing with some kind of rock-based music -- and no set dance steps. What one does is stand away from his partner and gesticulate as best he can to the tempo of the music. The skill level in this is minimal.

Time was, there was singing. To be a decent singer required a sense of pitch, a pleasing voice and perhaps formal training incorporating skills in phrasing, breathing and voice projection. Today, we have rap. Rap strikes me as closer akin to crude chant than singing. I suppose rap makes use of some skills, but you don't need to be able to sing at all to become a rapper, record your performances and become filthy rich.

A subject dear to this blog is painting, so let's consider the genre of Abstract Expressionism which is still practiced by many artists more than half a century after its heyday. Becoming a good abstract painter requires some skills in the areas of composition and color handling, among others. But there is one traditional graphic arts skill totally unnecessary: draftsmanship.

Is There a "Sweet Spot" for History?

Maybe.

Most observers of the writing of history agree that it usually takes a couple of decades or even more for events to be put into perspective. This is certainly true for political history where partisan passions easily color fairly recent happenings.

The historian of events of the more distant past faces another kind of problem: he has to rely on documentary evidence of one kind or another because all the participants or witnesses of those events cannot be questioned, given that they have died. It also should be mentioned that history is often (always?) viewed through the prism of the time of the historian -- another, though usually less-serious source of distortion.

These considerations suggest that a good time for an historian to get to work is when passions have cooled, embargoed documents have been made public, and there are participants around to interview.

I experienced this recently when I devoured two accounts of American professional football at the end of the 1950s. One book, The Glory Game, subtitled "How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever" was co-written by Frank Gifford, a veteran TV play-by-play announcer who was a star running back for the New York Giants team in that game.

The other book was That First Season by John Eisenberg, its subtitle being "How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory." The season was the 1959 one for the Green Bay Packers.

The events both books deal with are more than 50 years old, yet many of the participants were still alive to contribute their memories as supplemental -- or even primary -- material in conjunction with game films, sports reports and material in previous accounts of the events.

I found the details fascinating because they fleshed out what previously had been grainy black-and-white television images and names and faces of players lacking more data than descriptions of what they did on the field. (Actually, I exaggerate slightly because I've read other behind-the-scenes books about the Packers -- my fave team -- so my knowledge wasn't quite so one-dimensional as it was for the Giants and their victors, the Baltimore Colts.)

Combat Art: Worthwhile?

An art genre that has been virtually invisible for decades is Combat Art or War Art -- there's no definitive name for it. In the broadest sense, it can be any art where war is the subject. But for the purposes of this post, I'll narrow things down so that it means works by artists sent into war zones by military organizations for the purpose of recording events they encounter. For background, check out the links here, here and here.

Why combat art? The first link noted above offers a justification by Brigadier General Robert L. Denig, Director of Public Relations for the United States Marine Corps about the time America entered World War 2:

The combat photographer must snap his picture of an action as it happens. If he is busy taking part in the action, as he so often is; if it happens so fast he is unable to adjust his camera in time; if conditions are not good, the action is never recorded- and the picture is never made.

The artist, on the other hand, with his photographic eye, can take part in the action, and then paint any moment of it from memory at his leisure.

The painter can provide his own lighting; he can give a picture any degree of intensity he desires. He can reconstruct a scene from whatever angle he considers most dramatic, centering attention wherever he wishes.

I disagree, for the most part.

The most famous war paintings created before 1850 tended to be done by artists who were seldom witnesses to the events depicted. By mid-19th century, photography had been invented and improved to the point where cameras could be brought to scenes of battles (siege sites, aftermaths of combat), but were too cumbersome to record combat itself. This remained the case up to the time of the Great War. For example, the turn of the century Boer and Spanish-American wars were mostly recorded by sketch artists hired by newspapers and other publications. The Great War marks a transition where photographers and sketch artists coexisted. And by the time of World War 2, photography became the best means of recording warfare visually.

My disagreement with General Denig? I base it on the combat art I've encountered over the years. Nearly all the on-the-spot sort of work is no better than contemporary photography. Most often, the scenes were not actually combat -- instead, they showed the often dull daily life in the military. Furthermore, in my judgment, the really fine depictions of combat from, say, 1940 on have been done after the fact, often by artists who were not on the scene. No change, really, from pre-1850 times.

Although I'm sure I missed a really outstanding example or two, below are examples of Combat Art I found on the Web to document my case:

La Mitrailleuse - Christopher Nevinson, 1915
This is perhaps Nevinson's best-known painting. It abstracts what he possibly viewed in more ways than one.

Self Portrait - Sir William Orpen, 1917
Orpen was a top portrait painter who went to France to depict the Great War. Unfortunately, he totally botched the image of the British "tin plate" helmet; see below for a more accurate treatment.

Marines in France by Harvey Dunn
Although famed illustrator Dunn was in France for the war, I doubt he captured this image on the spot even in sketch form; if this was real combat he stood a good chance of being killed in such a setting and viewpoint.

Gassed - John Singer Sargent - 1919
This mural can be seen at the Imperial War Museum in London. Sargent witnessed this behind-the-trenches event and worked it into the painting, adding details to a quick sketch to make an interesting composition.

Sighting the sun by McClelland Barclay, 1941
Barclay was a successful illustrator in the 1920s and 30s who entered the U.S. Navy as a commissioned officer and war artist. The ships in the background of this painting are not realistically portrayed and the perspective is off. Some of Barclay's painting were used in Navy recruiting posters. Unfortunately, he payed a high price, being lost when his ship was sunk in the Pacific.

Mission briefing by Alex Raymond
Raymond was yet another famous artist before he joined the Marines. Although he did some commercial illustration, he was best known for his comic strips Secret Agent X-9, Jungle Jim and -- especially -- Flash Gordon. The non-combat scene shown here is typical of World War 2 combat art.

Moving Up - Howard Brodie
This Brodie scene, like much WW2 combat art, could just as easily been photographed.

Landing at Saipan - William Draper
Yet another case where the artist probably would have been killed if he actually was in the position suggested by his painting. The marines shown are clearly part of the initial attack wave. Draper would have to have been in a Japanese slit trench or bunker to capture this in person.

Ambush at Saipan - Theo Hios
Here is a sad example of both modernist sensibility and likely absence from the fight shown.

Surprise Attack in the Suburbs of Metz - Alphonse de Neuville
This depicts an event from the Franco-Prussian war. De Neuville was not there. But nevertheless, it is probably the best combat scene in the set of images above.

To summarize, in the era beginning with the development of the compact Leica camera, just about anything a combat artist might have captured directly, a photographer could have done an equally good or better job of recording the event. War paintings of superior artistic quality seem to be generally done much later by men who were not on the scene (though they might have been exposed to war or military life otherwise).

Weimar Cities

The Autumn 2010 issue of City Journal contains this article titled "Weimar Istanbul" by Claire Berlinski. Her thesis is that certain cities experienced strong busts of artistic creativity not long before all gets swept away by one disaster or another: these she terms Weimar Cities.

She states:

There is a spookiness to living in a city at the epicenter of an impending political catastrophe, a mood of dread but also of astonishing vitality—economic, creative, artistic. It is a distinctive mood and, to anyone acquainted with history, a familiar mood.

There is, it seems, such a phenomenon as a Weimar City.

What is a Weimar City? It is a city rich in history and culture, animated by political precariousness and by a recent rupture with the past, vivified by a shocking conflict with mass urbanization and industrialization; a city where sudden liberalization has unleashed the social and political imagination—but where the threat of authoritarian reaction is always in the air.

Her archetype is Berlin during the Weimar Republic era (1919-33), and she believes that Istanbul, where she has lived in recent years, is another example as Turkey drifts away from Mustafa Kemal's reforms and towards Islamic fundamentalism.

Other examples she cites are antebellum Charleston, Moscow and Petrograd in 1917, circa-1900 Vienna, 2002 Buenos Aires and Summer of Love San Francisco.

I find this concept intriguing and highly romantic. But I am not persuaded.

In the first place, the spur of knowing that doom is almost certainly in the offing doesn't happen all that often. Moreover, the future is always uncertain. This uncertainty might affect some sensitive, artistic minds even in comparatively calm times. And it can affect minds of average folks when events turn more sour than usual, but not necessarily disastrously; the United States since the economic crisis of 2008 is a case in point. Even in the best of times, the future is uncertain and the thought of it potentially stress-provoking; consider unease of living in one's times as chronic.

I agree that residents of Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian Empire around 1900 likely sensed the empire's decline and wondered how matters would play out once the elderly emperor Franz-Josef finally died. But did folks in Weimer Berlin in, say 1927, see doom in the future? Economic conditions were better than in the early 1920s. True, the Republic was a mess, but there was no strong reason to believe that anything would change much -- that Germany might well continue stumbling along as it had since the end of the Great War, risking disaster yet not quite encountering it. And, if there was to be fundamental change, it wasn't clear what sort of change might occur.

A second factor is that vibrant cultural and artistic periods lasted for decades in many places without much threat or actual occurrence of disaster. For example, England had a strong literary culture going back to the 18th century and continuing well into the 20th. Italy was strong in painting and sculpture from the 14th century through the 18th. Paris ruled the world of painting from the 18th century till nearly the middle of the 20th. The United States became an artistic powerhouse during the 20th century while its political and economic states were far more tranquil than those of other major countries.

Berlinski's citations of Charleston and San Francisco do not strikes me as compelling. Even though the South Carolina city held the spark that set off the Civil War, the conditions that set off that spark brewed up in conjunction with the 1860 presidential election and its result. That is, it's not like a strong sense of doom had been festering for years. And there was no general doom at in the San Francisco case (though I do think the place was approaching the tipping point from being a fun place to live to the weirdness and harshness I feel whenever I now visit it). At best, the peril in the air had to do with the Vietnam war and the threat young men had of being drafted into the army. Even that was a strong factor for those comparatively few young men of a certain age and draft number, and not young people in general.

All this is not to deny that something such as a Weimar City situation can't exist. I can see parallels between Weimar Berlin, 1900 Vienna and the two Russians cities. (Regarding the latter, I'd set the stress situation as longer term than just 1917. There was plenty artistic ferment starting the late 19th century and failure in the Russo-Japanese war resulted in a murky outlook for the czarist regime thereafter, contributing to a "Weimar" condition.)

In sum, what we are dealing with is subjectivity. How to define artistic, cultural, economic, etc. ferment along with the somewhat amorphous conditions that supposedly spark things. And where is a set of counter-examples of ferment without stress and stress without ferment, assuming such definitions can be made? Weimar Cities, therefore, might make for interesting speculation but are not likely to be a useful analytical or predictive tool of thought.

Morning in the Fez Medina

Never let a good pixel go to waste, sez I.

What follows are some snapshots taken while touring the market area of the Medina district of Fez, Morocco. (I'm writing this in Las Vegas, and might later post some pix of this equally exotic locale.)

As we were about to enter the Medina I noticed yet another load of tourists that likely were headed there too.

It's early. The place has yet to come to life, so there's plenty of room in the passageways.

If I were a publicist, I'd call the Medina a "covered urban mall" -- clearly, the covering here is to shade the sun rather than shield from rain.

When in carpet country, it's a near-impossibility for a tour group not to get steered into a rug emporium. That's the Big Guy launching his spiel.

Although small carts could traverse some passages, the main means of moving goods through the Medina is the donkey. The lower image is blurred because those donkeys move at a good clip. When they head your direction, you plaster yourself against the nearest wall.

Morocco is cat country. As you can see, they tend to be lean, not fluffy.

What's Not Where

I'm back from Spain, Portugal and Morocco. And still wiping the jet lag cobwebs from my brain -- but post, I must.

For starters, here are two slogans I came across:

This was taken at Casa Pepe, a road house just off the Autovia between Granada and Madrid. Pepe seems to be a huge fan of General Franco, the late Caudillo of Spain (I'll have more on Pepe's place in another post.) The slogan on the sign to the right can be translated as "This is Spain, not Europe."

I noticed this in Barcelona between the Plaça d'Espanya and the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. It's in English, presumably to get the message across to a wide foreign audience. Catalunya (better known to English speakers as Catalonia) is a region in northeastern Spain that has its own dialect which is slightly similar to dialects in southern France. Not all Catalonians consider themselves Spanish, it seems.

Racing Hydroplane Design Evolution

This probably isn't a big spectator sport in your neighborhood, but it was huge when I was growing up in Seattle. I'm talking about unlimited-class hydroplane racing.

This expensive sport was centered in Detroit for much of the first half of the 20th century and then caught fire in Seattle, as I'll explain below. Races are held elsewhere and there are pockets of interest in Madison, Indiana and a few other places, but Seattle and Detroit remain the heart of unlimited racing.

Being interested in design evolution, I've kept a casual eye out for changes to the physical form of unlimited hydros for years. The photos below summarize what's been happening these past 80 years.

Miss America X
Gar Wood's Miss America racers dominated the sport into the early 1930s. The Miss America shown above had a shallow V-bottom and "steps" such as are found on the bottoms of flying boats and float-plane floats. The concept was to lift the boat as high above water as possible so that it would tend to skip across the surface rather than plow through it. This goal is constant in power boat racing; what varies is the means used to maximize the effect.

Miss America X's four (!) engines
Miss America X was unusual in that it had four motors. Most unlimiteds make do with one and occasionally have two.

Tempo VI, owned by bandleader Guy Lombardo
Tempo VI, a pre-World War 2 design incorporates sponsons mounted on each side of the front part of the hull. These further raised the boat above the water; the "wetted area" comprised the rear underside of each sponson and the underside of the hull near the stern.

Miss Pepsi
Somewhat retrograde circa-1950 was Miss Pepsi which had a step-type hull similar to that of Miss America. Regardless, the Pepsi was very competitive against even the advanced designs exemplified by Slo-Mo-Shun IV (below).

Slo-Mo-Shun IV
Slo-Mo was designed by Ted Jones and owned by Seattle Chrysler dealer Stanley Sayres. It set a world straightaway speed record for boats in 1950, hitting 160 miles per hour on Lake Washington. Later that summer it traveled to Detroit and easily won the Gold Cup race which then was held in Seattle for the next few years.

Slo-Mo-Shun IV at speed
This shows Slo-Mo as she might have looked when setting the speed record. Note the characteristic high "rooster tail" of spray. This was a side-effect of Jones' design innovation. The wetted areas were small patches of the rear undersides of the sponsons. The rear part of the hull did not scrape the water as did Tempo VI. Instead, the final touch point of the so-called "three-pointer" was the propeller itself. It's the half-submerged prop that kicks up the rooster tail. For the last 60 years nearly all unlimited hydros followed this design approach.

Miss Budweiser, circa 1980

Front view of circa-1980 Miss Budweiser
As with Formula 1 racing cars, hydro designers decided that it was advantageous to improve driver visibility and improve comfort (sitting behind the engine exposed him to heat and fumes). Hence the "cab forward" design illustrated here.

Turbine-powered Miss Budweisers
For many years after World War 2 unlimited hydroplanes were powered by water cooled fighter plane engines-- Allisons at first, later by Rolls-Royce/Packard motors. But these were temperamental when modified to power racing boats and supplies of them were drying up. By the 1990s most designers switched to gas turbine power; note the air intakes shown in the photo. (The turbine drives a propeller, just as piston engines did.)

Another concern was driver safety. Unlimited hydro racing accidents cost the lives of a number of drivers over the years and resulted in serious, career-ending injuries to others. A solution that has worked well is the adaptation of cockpits from F-16 fighters for hydro use. Rather than being thrown out of the boat, the driver rides out the accident strapped to his seat in a waterproof enclosure with its emergency oxygen supply. These cockpits can be seen in the photo.

Flipped hydroplane -- shows plan view of recent designs
Slo-Mo-Shun IV had a spade-like profile when seen from above. This design proved to be too prone to the bow end lifting the boat into a spectacular back-flip. Some of this might have been due to aerodynamic lift if the boat's angle of attack changed, but the main reason had to do with air pushing on the underside of the hull, a force that becomes ever-stronger as the angle deviated from the horizontal. Over time the spade shape was abandoned for a "pickle fork" treatment that, suitably evolved by wind tunnel testing, resulted in the plan view seen here. Note the holes toward the front that lessen a potential flip-producing force. Obviously, flips still happen. But they now are more likely to result from digging into water stirred up by racing activity than being lifted higher after a bounce.

Many subtle improvements have been made, so today's hydros can lap a 3-mile racetrack-shaped course at speeds of 150 miles per hour -- not much less than Slo-Mo's 1950 straightaway record run. (Records after a 178 mph run in 1952 by Slo-Mo-Shun IV were set by prop-less jet-propelled boats. The current mark is just under 318 mph, set in 1978 -- Wikipedia entry here.)