The Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic (Late Old Stone Age) flourished between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago (or so we think, theories of carbon dating are subject to revision).
The Aurignacians are generally awarded the title of being our earliest genuinely human ancestors in Europe on the basis of artistic achievement. It was they who produced the Hohle-Fels Venus, the Chauvet cave paintings, and the Stadel cave Löwenmensch (“Lion Man”), all powerfully moving, but cryptic and fundamentally incomprehensible to us, artistic expressions.
The last object, the Löwenmensch, was discovered in a cave in the Swabian Alps in 1939. WWII resulted in its being neglected for 30 years, but eventually scholar attention arrived. The fragments were assembled, and interpreted. First, as a deity or a shaman representing a lion god, later as (Gawd help us!) a “cave lioness” and an icon of Stone Age Feminism.
Near the end of the last century, a few more pieces were discovered, so scientists are now in the process of removing earlier “restored” bits and having a go at reassembling the original artifact absent recent interpolations. The results will be very interesting.
When Patrick Stewart (formerly Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Federation Starship Enterprise) is a university’s chancellor, recruiting videos seem to become a bit more imaginative.
Robert Krulwich, at an NPR blog, offers a translation of Leonardo’s personal To-Do list from some point early in the 1490s.
It’s an interesting list, testifying to its author’s remarkably broad range of practical and abstract interests, and as Maggie Koerth-Baker notes admiringly, to his recognition of superior expertise in the possession of others.
I think it’s pretty interesting that of the nine tasks shown, six involve consulting and learning from other people. Leonardo da Vinci needs to find a book. Leonardo da Vinci needs to get in touch with local merchants, monks, and accountants who he hopes can help him better understand concepts within their areas of expertise.
Leonardo da Vinci knows he doesn’t know everything.
I think that’s a big deal.
The fact that questions Leonardo intends to address so commonly include notes of just how he intends to obtain the necessary information is, I think, likely to make many of us with experience in research smile in recognition of a kindred spirit.
Karen and I recently had the opportunity to view on Turner Classic Movies a curious, low budget old movie, “Love, Honor and Behave” (1938), lacking entirely a memorable big name cast, but specifically focused on the subject of Yalie-ness, on the distinctive old-fashioned Yale ethos.
The plot.
The marriage of old-time Yale man Dan Painter (Thomas Mitchell) to the stately and quite attractive Sally Painter (Barbara O’Neil, best known for playing the role of Scarlett O’Hara’s mother in “Gone With the Wind”, one year later, at age 28!) breaks up over a brief indiscretion. Sally remarries Doctor MacConaghey, taking away Dan’s son, Ted Painter (Wayne Morris).
Sally insists on raising Ted, contrary to his father’s wishes, as the paradigmatic good loser. Losing gracefully and graciously is her idea of being a gentleman. She refuses to send Ted to Andover (Dan’s old preparatory school), enrolling him in a different (possibly fictional) preparatory school in New Haven which I’d never heard of, because she believes Andover would make him too manly, too ruthlessly aggressive, and competitive. She won’t even allow Ted to play football like his father, bringing him up instead to be a tennis player.
Ted, at least, is permitted by mom to go to Yale. During his son’s senior year, Dan Painter is horrified as he watches Ted, playing for Yale, deliberately throw a tennis match against a Harvard rival because he believes the referee had previously made an erroneous call in his favor. Dan believes you ought to play by the rules, but you have to play to win. Intentionally losing is decidedly not proper manly behavior, not the Yale way.
The unhappy consequences of Ted’s upbringing by his mother continue even after graduation. Ted does rebel against mom, refusing to go to Medical School (in order to follow in his stepfather’s footsteps), but instead getting into the soap business in New Rochelle with a classmate. Ted also marries his childhood sweetheart Barbara Blake (Priscilla Lane) contrary to mom’s intentions and designs. But mother’s character formation lessons in uncompetitive self-effacement and non-aggression take their inevitable toll. The soap business goes under, and Ted cannot make Barbara happy.
When Ted’s business fails, Dan refuses to give Ted a job in his own business on grounds of principle (Dan is not only a Yalie, he talks exactly like an Ayn Rand character), and Ted is reduced to settling for menial work as a construction laborer for $3 a day.
Having had his problems trying to make a living during the Depression, Ted has been too busy working to entertain Barbara satisfactorily. Since he’s not available to take her out, and too passive to lay down the law, Barbara begins stepping out on Ted with a former rival. Finally, the worm turns, the deep-blue hereditary Yale blood (even without Andover’s influence) boils over, and Ted initiates a knock-down, drag-out fight with Barbara, ending in his giving her a good spanking. He also rises to the occasion and knocks down his rival with a good punch in the nose, and then throws him physically out of the house.
Dan Painter (conveniently on-hand to see the whole thing) is absolutely delighted. He now knows that his son has learned his lesson: that a man has to fight for things in this world, for success in business, even for his woman, just as he needs to be determined to achieve victory in athletic contests. Ted is now a properly competitive Yale man, just like his father.
LHB is certainly not a great film, not even a good film, but it is extremely interesting as a period piece and a case of watermark evidence of national-level recognition of a specific culture and personality associated with Yale way back then.
I was at Yale 30 years later, much had changed in America and at Yale, but I would say that even 30 years later, the “no excuses, just succeed” ethos had definitely survived in a number of undergraduate organizations right up into my day.
By now, Dan Painter’s hearty and unabashed, manly competitiveness must be thickly encrusted with layers of political correctness grown all over it like barnacles but I wonder if the same thing in essence, today unglorified, unacknowledged and unavowed, does not yet still survive at dear old Yale.
Harry B. Nielson, Mr. Fox’s Hunt Breakfast on Christmas Day, chromolithograph print published in Vanity Fair, Christmas, 1897
The hunter characteristically admires, and even identifies with, his quarry, and that sense of identification commonly leads to the visualization in the hunter’s imagination of the animal object of the chase as a fellow sportsman, participating in the hunt with equal pleasure and enthusiasm and equal relish of tradition.
The fantasy of the quarry-sportsman gives rise to one of the most popular and best-loved genres of sporting art, images of La Chasse Renversé, the roles of hunters and hunted reversed. No foxhunter’s den is completely furnished without a humorous print like A.C. Havell’s Foxhunter’s Dream or the beloved Mr. Fox’s Hunt Breakfast (above).
The same comedic effect, and the same sportsman’s pleasure in thinking of his adversary in the field as fellow sportsman, can be found in shooting prints, like the very well-known contemporary print by Alexander Charles-Jones “Cocks Only,” which gleefully depicts a line of Ringnecked Pheasants in hunting vests, smoking cigars and drinking while peppering a discomfited group of incoming naked men.
Another classic example of the same humorous genre by Snaffles, published in Hoghunter’s Annual in the 1930s, depicts a couple of senior ranking boars smoking cigars and admiring trophy mounts of British officers acquired in the hunting field.
I had assumed, without any special investigation or thought on the matter, that this genre of sporting humor was specifically British and Victorian, but I was decidedly wrong.
What I have referred to as La Chasse Renversé is, at least, a common medieval artistic humorous subject, found in all sorts of forms and expressions, in paintings, sculpture, manuscript illuminations, and even tiles, representing a variation of all kinds of humorous reversals referred to in general as Le Monde Renversé. I feel sure, at this point, that a thorough search would produce similar examples of sporting facetiae from Classical Antiquity.
Some excellent examples of the hare turning the tables on the hunter were posted at Archivalia.
The Hunter’s Doom,” marginal illumination to The Romance of Alexander by Jehan de Grise and his atelier, 1338-44, Bodleiana Ms. 264, fol. 81v
A Tourdion was a lively dance of the mid-15th to late 16th centuries invented in Burgundy. This one is performed by the Hungarian ensemble of Arany Zoltan.
Heritage Auctions is selling some of the famous actor’s personal effects and papers in Los Angeles in a sale ending October 6-7th.
I have glanced through some of the catalogue, and there is some fascinating stuff: costumes, hats, and even scripts from famous movies, including his eye patch from True Grit, a tweed overcoat from The Quiet Man, a Marine Corps uniform from Sands of Iwo Jima . There are letters from Jimmy Stewart, Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, and John F. Kennedy, and some very amusing letters from director John Ford, full of bawdy humor. They are even selling Wayne’s driver’s license and American Express card.
Lot 44129 is kind of interesting. It seems that, in 1977, just two years before his death, The People’s Almanac sent Wayne (along with other winners of the Academy Award) a poll questionnaire asking “who were and are the 5 best motion picture actors of all time…(and)...the 5 …best motion pictures of all time.”
John Wayne wrote down, as his list of actors: “1) Spencer Tracy 2) Elizabeth Taylor 3) Kathrine [sic] Hepburn 4) Laurence Olivier 5) Lionel Barrymore,” as his list of movies: “1) A Man for All Seasons 2) Gone with the Wind 3) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 4) The Searchers 5) The Quiet Man.”
The lot includes the actual handwritten lists, signed by John Wayne, and is currently bid at $800.
I thought it was odd that John Wayne shared the fashionable critics’ high regard for The Searchers, among his own films. I would argue strenuously myself that She Wore a Yellow Ribbon featured his most impressive all-time job of acting.
Roughly half of a 1923 silent film representing the earliest surviving work from Alfred Hitchcock’s pre-directorially-credited career was discovered, after sitting for 22 years in the collection of the New Zealand Film Archive.
The film’s discovery was the result of the American National Film Preservation Foundation’s efforts to recover lost films preserved by New Zealand collector James Murtagh, which were donated to the New Zealand Film Archive at the time of his death in 1989. New Zealand’s remoteness and the high expense of shipping films caused distributors to treat the island as an end of the road screening destination. Films were sent there last, and were intended to be destroyed, rather than returned, after their theatrical run.
The White Shadow (1923), a melodrama revolving around the conflict between two sisters (both played by Betty Compson), one angelic, one “without a soul,” featured the 24 year-old Hitchcock serving as writer, art drector, assistant director, and editor.
The surviving half of the film was screened last Thursday for cineastes at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences article
Jim Geraghty forwards Jim Lileks’ tweeted comment on a new song titled “Moves Like Jagger” by a group called Maroon 5, and marvels himself that today’s youth sings tributes to the masculine appeal of a (once androgynous) geezer.
You kids know Mick Jagger is 68, right? I’m sure he’s in relatively limber, perhaps drug-preserved state for a near-septuagenarian, but really? Tim Noah’s nephew [Adam Levine] is singing that he can dance like him and Kesha’s only interested in guys collecting Social Security? Did our pop culture get stuck on “pause” at some point?
It seems a bit strange to me that he still performs and that people so young even know who Mick Jagger is. The Stones ought to be, at this point, headlining on Cruise ships and in Florida retirement homes.
Personally, I have a suspicion that on very damp mornings like this, I move exactly like Jagger (before he’s had plenty of meds).
Watch out, liberals! Republicans are coming to get you.
The original Sam Peckinpaugh (1971) “Straw Dogs” was actually a pretty stupid film trafficking in the worst king of pop psychology clichés about sex, masculinity, and violence, but according to the New York Times’ reviewer A.O. Scott, the remake opening today, will be at least an interesting curiosity.
The new director has evidently removed some of poor old, pickled-in-alcohol and obsessed-with-violence, Sam Peckinpaugh’s personal dark obsessions, and has turned the remake into a cheerful tale of civilized Blue State elites turning the tables on violent, gun-and-God obsessed rednecks. Coastal elites may be losing in the political polls, but they can cheer in the movie house when the wimpy liberal takes out the Palin voter with a nail gun.
“Straw Dogs” — Rod Lurie’s odd and interesting remake of Sam Peckinpah’s venerable and violent button pusher — begins with a clash of cultural stereotypes. David Sumner (James Marsden) is a Hollywood screenwriter with an Ivy League education (or at least a Harvard T-shirt and fond memories of the Harvard-Yale game), newly arrived in his wife’s hometown, Blackwater, Miss. He is an effete coastal liberal, the kind of person who orders light beer at the local bar and grill, disdains its celebrated fried pickles and tries to pay with a credit card. He listens to classical music, uses big words like “acutely” and stays in shape by jumping rope. He can’t fix a roof or change a tire.
The local guys, for their parts, swear and fight and love guns, God and football. They listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a few of them look as if they could moonlight as roadies for that shaggy, tragic Southern band. They leer at David’s wife, Amy (Kate Bosworth), and are generally ill-mannered when they are not being ostentatiously and menacingly polite. They work with their hands and aren’t much for book learning. On an especially hot day, one of them says, “This must be that global warmin’ you educated fellers are always goin’ on about.”
The hyperbole is more amusing than offensive. Mr. Lurie, a former film critic whose earlier movies include politically tinged thrillers like “The Contender” and “Nothing but the Truth,” is holding a fun-house mirror up to an America that seems, at the moment, to thrive on polarization and mutual contempt. The reality is more complicated, but something of the corrosive, absurd logic of the culture wars is captured in the interactions between David and the gang of good ol’ boys who become his mortal enemies.
They are led by Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), a big, blond, handsome ex-jock who dated Amy in high school. He artfully exposes David’s snobbery and also plays on the newcomer’s liberal habits of deference and self-reproach. David may indeed think that he’s better than the residents of Blackwater, as Charlie insinuates, but he also accepts the idea, so central to their sense of identity, that the locals are more authentic than he is, closer to God and the earth and the real America.
So he tries to compromise and adapt to their ways, which only amplifies their contempt. He is someone to be mocked, abused and taken advantage of, but never respected. Finally, after too many indignities and too much bullying, he has no choice but to fight back.
There is an obvious political allegory here, and it’s possible that “Straw Dogs” will find a cult following among frustrated Democrats going into the next electoral cycle. ...
The setting and some details have changed — the previous David was a mathematician, writing a scholarly book instead of a screenplay on the Battle of Stalingrad — but the story and the characters are fundamentally the same. ...
Mr. Lurie’s movie does not quite succeed on its own, though it is pulpy and brutal and at times grotesquely comical. The story does not cohere, and the performances are uneven. But as a piece of film criticism — as a conversation with, and interpretation of, an earlier film — it is intriguing.
“Straw Dogs” has often been understood as an exposé of David’s hypocrisy, a revelation of the beast that lurks in the heart of even the most civilized and passive modern man. But David’s homicidal frenzy is not really a descent into the primal, macho swamp of vengeance and self-defense where his antagonists have always been content to dwell. He is not defending Amy or punishing her rapists — in neither version does she tell him about the attack — but rather taking up arms in defense of two abstract ideas: the sanctity of private property and the importance of due process.
No wonder the blue-state audience at the screening I attended cheered and hooted as David made ingenious use of a nail gun, a bear trap and two pots of boiling oil to keep his tormentors at bay. I’m kidding, to some extent. The response to righteous movie mayhem is always more visceral than philosophical. But “Straw Dogs” does give you something to think about.
(to be published February 7 of next year), the author explains that Leonardo da Vinci carried a notebook on his belt in which he constantly sketched or left memoranda to himself.
