History

Another visit to faux New Rochelle: Mary Tyler Moore with Carl Reiner, left, and Jerry Paris on the set of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" in 1963. Photo by Earl Theisen for the article "America's Favorite TV Wife" in Look magazine. View full size.

Global overpopulation has recently returned to the public spotlight with the publication of Inferno, the latest offering from novelist Dan Brown, author of the 2003 blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. A mystery thriller on the surface, Inferno is ultimately a piece of demographic fiction. As one reviewer notes, “The specter of a catastrophically overpopulated Earth, its desperate people grasping and ...This post is from GeoCurrents

June 1937. "Street corner. Black River Falls, Wisconsin." Medium format negative by Russell Lee for the Resettlement Administration. View full size.

http://cooper.edu/art/news/prof-sharon-hayes-wins-75k-alpert-award

To study closely a nineteenth-century lithograph or actually touch the impressions of type in the sheets of an eighteenth-century newspaper can be a magical, even transformative, experience. For years I have seen K-12 educators become engrossed and inspired by such activities. However it was only after we conducted a one-day workshop for K-12 educators on [...]

Jungfrukallan (The Virgin Spring). 1960. Sweden. Directed by Ingmar Bergman These notes accompany screenings of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring on May 22, 23, and 24 in Theater 3. Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) had turned 40, and had already directed 20 films (including international hits like Sawdust and Tinsel, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Magician), when he made his Oscar-winning Jungfrukallan (The Virgin Spring). Although he was an established director, there is, for me, a sense of breakthrough in The Virgin Spring. Bergman had worked with the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist once before (on the excellent Sawdust and Tinsel/The Naked Night), but with The Virgin Spring they embarked on a quarter-century-long collaboration and mutual dependence with few rivals in film history. As Robin Wood points out in his book-length study of Bergman, one of the great virtues of The Virgin Spring is the credible re-creation of medieval life, largely devoid of the mysticism and magic so dominant in much of Bergman’s work. The film thus makes him more accessible, and much of the credit must go to Nykvist’s ability to capture the textures of the natural world. For once, it seems Bergman is not manipulating his characters to present larger metaphysical truths in his obsession with his personal relationship with God. I don’t pretend to be an authority on Christianity or any other religion, but it seems that, over time, Bergman despaired of faith in a way the great Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer (Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, Ordet) did not. Ultimately, Bergman seemed to retreat to a realistic/autobiographical/non-cosmic milieu (as in Scenes from a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander). Max von Sydow and Gunnel Lindblom are illustrative of another important aspect of Bergman’s career. Great directors (Griffith, Chaplin, Renoir) had historically relied on their own personal stock companies of actors. Von Sydow and Lindblom (today both well into their eighties) were there for him well before The Virgin Spring, and remained for decades. The former, of course, parlayed his Bergman connection into a highly successful international career, including two Oscar nominations and roles as varied as Jesus, Father Merrin (the exorcist in The Exorcist), and Ming the Merciless. Bergman’s reputation in America has undergone a degree of revisionism. By the time of The Virgin Spring he was considered, as Daniel Humphrey puts it in his new book Queer Bergman, “arguably the paradigmatic figure in the history of mid-twentieth-century art cinema.” In big cities and college towns, it was impossible to ignore the pervasiveness of his influence, even though a great many who venerated him were blissfully unaware that serious filmmaking was already a half-century old and that Bergman, himself, was singing the praises of a disreputable cowboy director named John Ford. It would have been impossible to foresee a time when a screening of Wild Strawberries or this film would meet with surprise. I must confess to a certain ambivalent respect for Bergman’s work. His serious films seem perhaps too serious, his comedies perhaps too unfunny; I feel strangely more comfortable with his operatic adaptation of The Magic Flute or the soap opera-ish Scenes from a Marriage. And, frankly, this may result more from my failings, not Ingmar’s. *************************************************** It might be appropriate here, while praising Bergman’s recreation of the medieval world, to take note of the passing of Ray Harryhausen. During his 70-year career, Harryhausen seldom took directorial credit for his films, but he managed like very few others (designer William Cameron Menzies or special effects guru and Harryhausen mentor Willis O’Brien, for example) to place a personal stamp on the work. In the process, he created his own world of the past (both archeological and mythological) and the future.

The Eurovision Song Contest has been broadcast every year since it started in 1956 and is one of the longest-running television programmes in the world. Up to 600 million people across the globe watch each year, including my family. Congratulations to Denmark for their great success this week.**In 1970, Ireland’s Dana Rosemary Scallon (born 1951) unexpectedly won Eurovision. Her song, a very soft, passive version of All Kinds of Every­thing, was Ireland's first ever victory in this very important competition. Dana, as she was known, was a teenage school student, Catholic, anti-women’s rights in abor­tion, contrac­ep­tion and divorce, and later married with four children.In 1967, Dana’s family had moved to the Bogside, an area in the shadows of the historic city walls of Derry in Northern Ireland. The Bogside was a majority-Catholic area within a Protestant-British state which probably explains the long and terrible history of unrest in Dana’s home town in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And it also probably explains why Dana’s victory was so sweet for Catholic Irish citizens.The other Dana, Dana International (born 1969) is an Israeli-born pop singer of Yemenite Jewish parents. Born Yoram, he was the youngest of three children and was named after an uncle who had been massacred by Arab terrorists. Dana International in featherswinning for Israel, 1998Dana International could not have been more different from Ireland’s Dana. The Israeli lad came out as a transsexual when he was barely into his teens and underwent sex reassignment surgery in London in his mid 20s. Could the very gorgeous Dana International have known at that stage that she was going to have an unlikely win in Eurovision and follow in the footsteps of Ireland’s very plain Dana?In 1998 Dana International was selected to represent Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest with her song Diva. Diva was an amazing song about strong women in history: “Viva nari'a, viva Victoria, AfroditaViva la-Diva, viva Victoria, Cleopatra”. Dana International came onto the Eurovision stage in Birmingham, with confident movement, fabulous legs, fabulous dress, amazing voice and jazzy lyrics, and took the audience’s breath away. There was nothing passive about this Dana! Every Jewish viewer in the world (except perhaps for the most religious) prayed to whatever god they had ..for a win for Dana International. Gays, straights and transsexuals thought their moment in the sun had arrived. Jordan and the other middle eastern countries censored her performance and blocked their state-run television programmes whilst the Jewish performer was on state. Yet she won anyhow!Dana International released Diva as a single in Europe and the song climbed towards the very top of the hit parade in the UK, Sweden, Belgium, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands. She later represented Israel in Eurovision for a second time, but never quite reached the giddy heights of 1998.For Israel's gay community, Dana International's victory in the Euro­vision song contest was a turning point. When Israelis celebrated Dana International's victory in the streets of Tel Aviv that night, people started to recog­nise that there was a big gay community, full of talent and colour. Eurovision’s own history page said that Time magazine chose her as one of the important people in the world. Dana International's story is not only the story of a successful singer; it is a rare and in­sp­iring story about courage. She completed the cultural revolution that she started with her first album; a symbol of liberalism and human rights.Dana,winning for Ireland, 1970.

Late antiquity has not been especially well-served by the novelist. I have a fondness for Manfredi's The Last Legion, despite the film and the dreadful English translation. Probably the best evocation of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire remains Iain Pears' The Dream of Scipio. It is now worth flagging up The Boy Orestes a new novella by Gareth Power. It is the first of a series that wil continue until the resignation of Romulus Augustulus. The Boy Orestes is set in Pannonia in AD433 as Orestes, better known as the father of Romulus Augustulus, turns 16. Researched in some detail, characters of the period - Aetius and Avitus to name just two - make appearances. Worth a read!

On this date in 1940, Cayetano Redondo was shot at Madrid’s largest cemetery. Cayetano Redondo (English Wikipedia page | Spanish | Esperanto), a former journalist and editor, was the socialist onetime mayor of Madrid — having ascended that position during the Spanish Civil War when the previous mayor fled for Valencia as Franco attacked Madrid. Redondo was the guy with his name on the letterhead during the bloody November 1936 Battle of Madrid, when the Luftwaffe tried out terror bombing (Guernica followed in April 1937). This “hombre de una bondad inagotable” (Manuel Albar, quoted here) was also a leading esperantist — an advocate of building international solidarity through the extension of the constructed language Esperanto. Disdaining escape as the war ended, he was arrested when Franco’s forces finally took Madrid in 1939 and shot a year later as a rebel. (His tombstone evidently records the wrong date.) Though Redondo was long a neglected figure, the Madrid city council recently named a street for him. So he’s got that going for him.

Ten-year-old Jack Sinclair discovered a Civil War cannonball when digging in his back yard in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, England. His father had dug up a tree root and Jack, an avowed digger of things, kept excavating the hole until it was two feet deep. When his spade hit something hard, he thought it was a rock at first but then realized that it was bigger and denser. He got down on the ground to pull it out and retrieved a very heavy, rusty, muddy lump. His mother was concerned that it might be an unexploded bomb from World War II, but when they cleaned off the dirt, they saw it was an iron cannonball. His grandfather Graham Sinclair researched the nine-pound ball. Together they took to the Newark and Sherwood District Council’s Museum Resource Centre in Newark where experts examined the artifact and verified with 90% certainty that it is a 17th century cannonball used during the Civil War. They were able to compare it to many Civil War cannonballs in the Museum Resource Centre’s collection. Its weight and dimensions suggest it was shot from a saker cannon, a medium-caliber long range cannon that was widely used in the early 16th century and 17th century. It’s the first Civil War cannonball unearthed in Southwell. Most of the ones in the Museum Resource Centre were found 8 miles away in Newark which was a Royalist city of major strategic importance repeatedly besieged by Parliamentary forces between 1643 and 1646 when King Charles I ordered the city garrison to surrender. Southwell has been overshadowed by its neighbor, but it too played a significant role during the Civil War. Charles I spent his last night of freedom at a pub in Southwell called the King’s Arms. On May 5th, 1646, Charles arrived in Southwell disguised as a lackey. He had dinner at the King’s Arms with the Scottish Commissioners during which he deployed his awful negotiating skills to sway them to his side. The Commissioners insisted that he sign the Solemn League and Covenant granting them religious freedom which Parliament had agreed to but then ignored, establish Presbytery (a governing body of elders) in England, that he fire the Marquis of Montrose, a Covenanter who switched sides to fight for the king, and that he surrender to the Scottish army at Newark. The next day he surrendered and was taken to Newcastle upon Tyne. Charles kept wheeling and dealing, refusing to fulfill various parts of the bargain, convinced that he could negotiate a better deal for himself even as he was captive of Scottish forces. He couldn’t. On the 30th of January, 1647, the Scots handed Charles over to Parliament in exchange for £100,000 up front (a fraction of the money Parliament had promised them before they joined the fray) with more to come. Southwell was handled roughly by Cromwell’s troops in the wake of Charles’ surrender. They used the Archbishop’s Palace as a stable for their horses, looted graves, damaged the Minster and generally trashed the place. Legend has it that Cromwell himself made a point of staying in the King’s Arms in the very suite Charles had slept in the night before his surrender. That pub is still standing, now called the Saracen’s Head Hotel, and visitors can stay in the King Charles Suite where he slept. Some beautiful Elizabeth era murals painted around 1590 in that room and one other were rediscovered during a renovation in 1986. To celebrate the area’s rich history, the Newark and Sherwood District Council has secured a £5.4 million (ca. $8,240,000) grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to create a National Civil War Centre in Newark. It’s scheduled to open in 2014. Jack Sinclair won’t be donating his prize cannonball to the new center, however. He’s keeping it. His school, Lowe’s Wong Junior School, is planning a special assembly dedicated to the cannonball.