Timeless

Best wishes to Charles Durning, who celebrates his 89th today – he’s one of those actors whose name you may not know, but whose face is very familiar from the dozens of supporting roles he’s played. Durning has done much for vets over his lifetime – he was himself twice wounded in WWII, the first time just after having survived the landing at Omaha Beach and again before the Battle of the Bulge – he recovered just in time to participate.

Here he is in ‘The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas’:

It is also Zero Mostel’s birthday.  Mostel (1915-77) emerged unscathed from WWII, but not from the HUAC hearings in the 50s – he was blacklisted for most of the decade, but a way off-Broadway performance as Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in Nighttown was a turning point.  Here he is in ‘The Producers’ with the only actor who could steal a scene from him:

European spring

Marx

It really started the summer before, but February was the month that the revolutions of 1848 got rolling, beginning with yet another French revolution, the third or fourth since the big one.  Louis Phillipe, who had been chosen to replace his father in 1830, was a constitutional monarch, but over the course of his reign, things grew gradually worse until an economic depression in 1847 triggered revolutionary fervor.

(Off topic – but neat – is the fact that LP had spent much of his early life in exile, including a period in the United States, part of the time in Boston, where he lived above the Union Oyster House and taught French.)

Interestingly, among the causes of the revolution was Louis’ favoring of bankers and stock exchange managers, part of a growing financial aristocracy that ran things. And by the end of his reign, French citizens with the franchise were down to about 1% of the population, since only landowners could vote.

Engels

Altogether, it made for an unhappy middle and working class and by February 22, the streets were filled with protesters marching and manning the barricades.  The next day, the Prime Minister resigned and Louis, seeing the handwriting on the wall, fled to England.  The Second Republic was declared.

Meanwhile, a workers’ political organization in England – the Communist League – had asked Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for a statement of principles.  The result, based on a first draft by Engels, was the Communist Manifesto by Marx.  The 50-page pamphlet – in German – was published on February 26 (or maybe the 21st – sometime around now) and was translated into English two years later.

The Manifesto was described in 2003 by English Marxist Chris Harman as having
‘insight after insight into the society in which we live, where it comes from and where it’s going to. It is still able to explain, as mainstream economists and sociologists cannot, today’s world of recurrent wars and repeated economic crisis, of hunger for hundreds of millions on the one hand and “overproduction” on the other. There are passages that could have come from the most recent writings on globalisation.’

While the Communist Manifesto – which can be read at Project Gutenberg - had little to do with the revolutions of 1848, it was a good peg to hang the general unrest on and so it got Marx expelled from Belgium and the newspapers that published it suppressed.

Louis Philippe

The French Revolution of 1848 collapsed, as did those in dozens of other countries – despite demands for a greater distribution of wealth, political freedom, nationalism (especially in countries ruled by the Austro-Hungarian empire) and more participatory democracy, about the only result of the uprisings were an end to serfdom in Austria and absolute monarchy in Denmark. 10,000 people died and thousands more emigrated, many to the US.

But the ideas of the Communist Manifesto percolated into the general consciousness and found their most egregious expression in Russia almost 70 years later.   John Raines, in the introduction of Marx on Religion (Temple UP, 2002) has written “In our day this Capitalist Revolution has reached the farthest corners of the earth. The tool of money has produced the miracle of the new global market and the ubiquitous shopping mall. Read the Communist Manifesto, written more than one hundred and fifty years ago, and you will discover that Marx foresaw it all.”

Handel at the mall

It’s pretty interesting that the old guy on the left,  born in 1685, is still relevant 327 years later, but then he’s Georg Frideric Handel, and he is still top of the charts. One can’t help but wonder – especially on this, his birthday – what his reaction would be to seeing a bit of the Messiah performed in a mall food court.  And would the fact that 37 million people have viewed the performance even compute? That’s about six times the entire population of England at the time he wrote it.

One of his best tunes is Zadok the Priest, which he wrote for the coronation of George II and which has been performed at every coronation since.  Here, the Danes have used it for a wedding march – Crown Prince Frederik doesn’t seem to find it very soothing, but the bride is quite composed.

Back to business

The Empress of China

The minute the Treaty of Paris was signed – and hostilities between the US and Britain ceased – businessmen got back to business and the Empress of China took off for the Far East.

The Empress had been a privateer during the war, but was quickly refitted for the long trip to Canton. Frozen in New York harbor briefly, she was able to leave when the ice broke up on February 22, 1784, and to the delight of her investors, she returned 14 months later with what would become staples of the China Trade: tea, silks and china.

Then, as now, the Chinese were much more interested in selling than buying.  The fledgling US really didn’t have much to offer in any case – though the furs of the northwest were popular -  and in any event, the real money was made back home, where tea from China was cheaper than the overpriced India variety from Britain and the silks and fine china were coveted by every housewife.

Export porcelain

The one exception to that rule was, curiously, ginseng.  The herb, highly prized by the Chinese, is native only to Korea, Manchuria – and Appalachia. Ginseng kept the China Trade healthy in those early years.

For a riveting account of the voyage to Canton, the National Archives has posted the diary of Catherine Delano‘s trip in 1862 – she and her six children (one of whom would become FDR’s grandmother) traveled on the China clipper Surprise to join her husband and he. thoughtfully, leased the whole boat for her.  Sufficiently roomy for her to take a piano.

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Happy birthday to GW – PBS recently aired a very interesting documentary on the Washingtons, showing how a rich and influential family wound up taking a chance on the New World.  (Loyal royalists, they lost it all during the Civil War.) Annoyingly, it is completely un-locatable on the PBS website, but here’s a clip from the ever-reliable YouTube:

Playing along

Gil Shaham celebrates his 41st birthday today and it was a tough choice between the Vivaldi and the Bach for a clip – he is brilliant at both – but the Bach gives a better view of his very interesting violin. It’s the Comtesse de Polignac and was loaned to him by the Stradivari Society of Chicago in 1989.

The Stradivari Society is an unusual non-profit that puts musicians and owners of Strads together, a good deed since most young musicians, however talented, don’t have millions for a violin. And while there are many good musicians, there are only about 500 Strads in the world, plus a handful of violas and cellos. Yo-yo Ma, for instance, plays the Stradavarius that once belonged to Jacquelin du Pre.

A number of Strads have gone missing – stolen and never recovered – although a few have turned up eventually. Bronislaw Huberman’s Gibson was stolen and recovered twice and then went to Joshua Bell. Anna Sophie Mutter owns two of her own. There is a story to go with every name, but I have to say my favorite Stradivarius is one of the two owned by the L.A. Philharmonic. Not the Earl of Plymouth that Fritz Kreisler sold them – the other one, the Benny.

Signed, LCT

To commemorate Louis Comfort Tiffany’s birth on this date in 1848, take a virtual tour of Haworth House, the largest collection of Tiffany in Europe. Below, a Tiffany stained glass mural at Yale, entitled Education. 

Yale, btw, was worried about  the window during student protests in the spring of 1970, so the art department was charged with crating and storing it until things settled down. When they went to retrieve it later, it wasn’t there. More months passed and a student happened to notice it behind a curtain in its original position.  Not only had the Tiffany window not been protected, the windows sent to storage in its place had disappeared – either lost or stolen. All the details here.

Expressions

First, some unfinished business – for  Dickens fans who missed all the hoopla on the 2ooth anniversary of his birth yesterday, still time to try this – the Guardian calls it a fiendishly difficult quiz and that pretty much describes it.

Deer in the woods, by Franz Marc.

Second, today is star-crossed for the arrival of actors.  Celebrants include Dame Edith Evans, Charlie Ruggles, Betty Field, Lana Turner, Audrey Meadows, Jack Lemmon, Stanley Baker, James Dean, Nick Nolte, Alejandro Rey, Brooke Adams, Mary Steenburgen and Mary McCormack.

It is also the birth date of Franz Marc, a painter born in Austria in 1880. Marc, a key figure in the development of Expressionism and one of the founders of the influential art journal Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), produced a significant amount of work in his short career.  He had acquired enough of a reputation to make the list of artists that the German government planned to keep away from combat in WWI, but before the orders were issued, Marc was killed by shrapnel at the battle of Verdun.  More images here.

Horse in a landscape.

Power to the people

The biggest power company in the United States was created by Congress in 1933. It signed its first contract with a municipality on this date in 1934 and now provides energy to more than nine million people.

Area served by the TVA - red for dams, purple for nukes, yellow for 'fossil' plants. Map by ChrisRuvolo

It was one of the government’s really good ideas during the Depression – it brought electricity to people who were still using kerosene lanterns and deforesting the hills to provide heat.   They were the citizens of Appalachia for the most part and while their average income was about $690 a year, some lived on less than $100.

Power would surely make life better and power would definitely bring business – i.e., jobs – to the area. And the new agency would be empowered to create regulations, putting some constraints on a completely unregulated private sector industry.

Aerial view of the coal ash spill. TVA photo.

So 15,000 families were displaced and dams were built, and the Tennessee Valley Authority was soon up and running.  It brought the primitive living conditions of the area into the 20th century, and with the advent of WWII, it became a critical part of American infrastructure.

But that was then.  It is hard, these days, to look at the map of the TVA’s 29 dams, three nuclear power plants (with six reactors) and 11 coal-fired power plants and feel that we are doing the best we can.  Granted, TVA just made a deal to produce some wind power, but their many solar installations are mostly at schools and stadiums – and one at Dollywood for some reason – and most are in the 7-30kW range,

And then there’s the incident that occurred at the Kingston Fossil Plant three years ago – when an earth dike gave way and one billion gallons of highly toxic wet coal ash spilled out, covered 300 acres of land and leaked into the Emory and Clinch Rivers. It was the worst such spill ever. Details about the toxins spread both up and downstream are here.

The TVA was a great idea in 1933.  Time to do better.

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Many happy returns to Eddie Izzard, born this date in 1962.  I didn’t get him at first, but then I did. (NB: NSFWV or something like that….)

Mental health break

What a week – the level of meaningless noise seemed higher than usual. . so let’s have a little peace and  love, burn some sage and celebrate Kitaro’s 59th birthday with a short version of the classic Silk Road:

Monarch of all he surveyed

When 19-year-old Alexander Selkirk found himself in trouble with the elders of the kirk for misbehaving in church, he ran away from his home in Fife and went to sea.

Juan Fernandez archipelago

That was in 1695.  By 1703 he was a buccaneer, serving aboard the Cinque Ports, a galley owned by the privateer William Dampier, with Thomas Stradling as captain.

The cast of characters here matters.  It was with Stradling that Selkirk had a dispute  that would change not only his life, but the history of literature. In 1704, the Cinque Ports was sailing along the Pacific coast of South America when Selkirk became convinced it wasn’t seaworthy anymore and he tried to talk Stradling into abandoning the ship.

Stradling refused, but was willing to let Selkirk go his own way in a dinghy with a few supplies.Selkirk urged his shipmates to join him, but all refused.

And so he found himself alone, marooned on one of the tiny volcanic islands of the Juan Fernandez archipelago off the coast of Chile. It was called the Island That’s Farthest Away, though it is actually the closest to Chile.  (It had been named by a sailor who saw it from out at sea.)

Unfortunately, it was uninhabited, which made life very lonely for Selkirk.  Fortunately, feral goats and cats – which had survived previous shipwrecks – were plentiful.  Goats provided food and eventually clothing, while the cats kept the rats at bay, allowing him to sleep.

Catching and cooking goats, building two huts and reading from his Bible were just about the total of his activity for the next four years.  Twice, ships landed near the island, but he hid from them both times – they were Spanish and as far as he knew, they were the enemy. He was right; the War of the Spanish Succession had not yet ended.

Finally,on February 1 in 1709, he was rescued by an English privateer -  piloted by none other than his old employer, William Dampier.  It was captained by Woodes Rogers, who would later include Selkirk’s adventures in his own memoir, undoubtedly read by Daniel Defoe.

William Dampier

After a brief period of notoriety back home, Selkirk returned to the sea, dying aboard ship in 1721 when the crew contracted yellow fever.

The Cinque Ports, btw, did founder off the coast of Colombia not long after Selkirk left it – the survivors were picked up by the Spanish and thrown into prison.

Today, Selkirk’s island is populated by about 600 people and is known as Robinson Crusoe Island.  Not far from it is Alejandro Selkirk Island.

One of the many literary appreciations of Selkirk was William Cowper’s The Solitude Of Alexander Selkirk, the first line of which became iconic:

I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute;
From the centre all round to the sea,
I am lord of the fowl and the brute.