Ordinary finds

On June 26, 1963 JFK gave his great “Ich Bin Ein Berliner”-speech (full text and media at the link). Before taking the podium on the balcony of Rathaus Schöneberg in West Berlin, he wrote down the phrases in German and Latin that he needed to use, in his own private Bostonian phonetic transcription (image above): “Ich bin ein Berliner”; “civis Romanus sum”; “Lass sie nach Berlin kommen”…

Kennedy’s command of foreign languages being poor, his pronunciation came out quite garbled, and his notion that the “Ber-” part of the the Berliner-phrase was the tough bit is of course completely mistaken. At least he reminded himself to say “bear” and not “burr” for the “Ber-” syllable.

Some have argued that Kennedy also made an idiomatic mistake by putting in the definite article “the” in front of “Berliner” - and that he therefore in fact said - not “I am a citizen of Berlin”, but rather “I am a jelly-filled doughnut”. There is disagreement even between German speakers on this point. Fact is that a jelly-filled doughnut in German is called a “Berliner Pfannkuchen”, or ‘pancake from Berlin’…

“William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin (June 26, 1824 – 1907) was an Irish-born British mathematical physicist and engineer. At Glasgow University he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its modern form. He is widely known for developing the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature measurement. He also had a later career as an electric telegraph engineer and inventor, a career that propelled him into the public eye and ensured his wealth, fame and honour.” (Wiki)

No actor ever scared me more than the great Peter Lorre (June 26, 1904 - 1964), Jewish-Hungarian, later American, specialist in portraying the foreign villain capable of projecting infinite evil…

Pearl S. Buck (June 26, 1892 - 1973) was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She grew up in China, where her parents were missionaries, but was educated at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. After her graduation she returned to China and lived there until 1934 with the exception of a year spent at Cornell University, where she took an M.A. in 1926. Pearl Buck began to write in the twenties; her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, appeared in 1930. It was followed by The Good Earth (1931), Sons (1932), and A House Divided (1935), together forming a trilogy on the saga of the family of Wang. The Good Earth stood on the American list of «best sellers» for a long time and earned her several awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal… (from the Nobel Biography of Buck)

Pearl S. Buck became the first American woman to receive the Nobel for Literature in 1938 -given for “her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.” She could with equal justification be considered the first Chinese Literature Laureate…

“Laurie Lee (June 26, 1914 – 1997) was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter, raised in the village of Slad, Gloucestershire. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). While the first volume famously recounts his childhood in the idyllic Slad Valley, the second deals with his leaving home for London and his first visit to Spain in 1934, and the third with his return in December 1937 to join the Republican International Brigade.” (Wiki)

Lee was a talented musician and musicologist, and early on in his life he used the violin he always carried with him to break the ice and come into contact with people everywhere. He also had quite a way with the ladies - from Wilma Gregory who sponsored him when he first went to Spain, and later helped him get an education - to his on and off lover Lorna Wishart, with whom he had a daughter, and of whom her biographer says:

“Lorna, the baby of the family, was perhaps the most flamboyant of the fabulous Garmans. She wore beautiful and unusual clothes and smelled of Chanel No. 5, went riding on her horse at night, drove a chocolate-brown Bentley, and would strip naked to swim in inviting lakes or rivers or 10-metre waves. At 14 she seduced the man who would become her husband when she was 16, the publisher Ernest Wishart.”

Photo of Laurie Lee by Larry Burrows, 1951 at The Eccentrics Corner of the Lion and Unicorn pavilion for the Festival of Britain…

Lorna Wishart (née Garman) - one of the subjects of The Rare and the Beautiful – The Lives of the Garmans by Cressida Connolly…

“Aimé Césaire (June 26, 1913 – 2008) was an Afro-Martinican francophone poet, author and politician.

In Paris, Césaire, who in 1935 passed an entrance exam for the École normale supérieure, created, with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas, the literary review L’Étudiant Noir (The Black Student) which was a forerunner of the Négritude movement. In 1936, Césaire began work on his book-length poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal - Notebook of a Return to My Native Land - (1939), a vivid and powerful depiction of the ambiguities of Caribbean life and culture in the New World and this upon returning home to Martinique.

Césaire married fellow Martinican student Suzanne Roussi in 1937. Together they moved back to Martinique in 1939 with their young son. Césaire became a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where he taught Frantz Fanon and served as an inspiration for, but did not teach, Édouard Glissant. He would become a heavy influence for Fanon as both a mentor and a contemporary throughout Fanon’s short life.

The years of World War II were ones of great intellectual activity for the Césaires. In 1941, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Roussi founded the literary review Tropiques, with the help of other Martinican intellectuals like René Ménil and Aristide Maugée, in order to challenge the cultural status quo and alienation that then characterized Martinican identity. Many run-ins with censorship did not deter Césaire from being an outspoken defendant of Martinican identity. He also became close to French surrealist poet André Breton, who spent time in Martinique during the war.

In 1947 he was finally able to publish his book Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), which he had actually finished in 1940. The book mixes poetry and prose to express his thoughts on the cultural identity of black Africans in a colonial setting. Breton contributed a laudatory introduction to the 1947 edition of Cahier…, saying that “this poem is nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time.” (“ce poème [n’est] rien moins que le plus grand monument lyrique de ce temps”)” (Wiki)

From Notebook of a Return to My Native Land:

At the end of daybreak…

   Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it,
I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope.
Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned
toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face
of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a
never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the
monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a
river of turtledoves and savanna clover which I carry forever
in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most
arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force
of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed
venereal sun.

   At the end of daybreak burgeoning with frail coves, the hungry
Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dyn-
amited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust
of this town sinisterly stranded.

   At the end of daybreak, the extreme, deceptive desolate eschar
on the wound of the waters; the martyrs who do not bear witness;
the flowers of blood that fade and scatter in the empty wind
like the screeches of babbling parrots; an aged life mendacious-
ly smiling, its lips opened by vacated agonies; an aged poverty
rotting under the sun, silently; an aged silence bursting with
tepid pustules, the awful futility of our raison d’être.

   At the end of daybreak, on this very fragile earth thickness
exceeded in a humiliating way by its grandiose future—the vol-
canoes will explode, the naked water will bear away the ripe
sun stains and nothing will be left but a tepid bubbling pecked
at by sea birds—the beach of dreams and the insane awakening.

   At the end of daybreak, this town sprawled-flat, toppled from
its common sense, inert, winded under its geometric weight of
an eternally renewed cross, indocile to its fate, mute, vexed
no matter what, incapable of growing with the juice of this
earth, self-conscious, clipped, reduced, in breach of fauna
and flora. 
 

“Gilberto Gil (b. June 26, 1942) is a Grammy Award-winning Brazilian singer, guitarist, and songwriter, known for both his musical innovation and his political commitment. From 2003 to 2008, he served as Brazil’s Minister of Culture in the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Gil began playing music as a child and was still a teenager when he joined his first band. He started out as a bossa nova musician, eventually writing songs that reflected a new focus on political awareness and social activism. He was a key figure in the Música Popular Brasileira and Tropicalismo movements of the 1960s, alongside artists such as longtime collaborator Caetano Veloso. The Brazilian military regime that took power in 1964 saw both Gil and Veloso as a threat, and the two were held for nine months in 1969 before they were told to leave the country. Gil moved to London, but returned to the Brazilian state of Bahia in 1972 and continued his musical career, as well as working as a politician and environmental advocate.

Gil’s musical style incorporates an eclectic range of influences, including rock, Brazilian genres including samba and forró, African music, and reggae.” (Wiki)

Below: Gilberto Gil’s Portuguese version of Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry, Não Chore Mais

“Claudio Abbado (b. June 26, 1933), is an Italian conductor. He has held many of the most prestigious positions in the world of classical music, having served as music director of the La Scala opera house in Milan, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, music director of the Vienna State Opera, and, most recently, principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra from 1989 to 2002, when he retired from the position for health reasons.” (Wiki)

Abbado is a specialist in opera and vocal music, and hard to equal in those fields - unfortunately he has had to battle cancer since 2000…

Istanbul based Mexican photographer Andres Gonzalez has a new project, Tarlabashi, photographed in the Kurdish neighborhood he calls home…

Gonzalez’ website contains several more projects taken along roads that inspire deep wanderlust, a reminder that the world is too vast and beautiful to be left unexplored. (Source)

Nicholas Hughes: In Darkness, 2007

Bob Thompson (June 26, 1937 - 1966): The Spinning, Spinning, Turning, Directing, 1963 - oil on canvas (Smithsonian)

“I paint many paintings that tell me slowly that I have something inside of me that is just bursting, twisting, sticking, spilling over to get out. Out into souls and mouths and eyes that have never seen before. The Monsters are present now on my canvas as in my dreams. …” - Thompson in Gylbert Coker, The World of Bob Thompson, (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1979), 21–22.

“Bob Thompson’s short, but dynamic, career began in the late 1950s and ended in his premature death less than a decade later. Like other artists of his generation in New York, Thompson developed a vital new figurative style in reaction to the dominance of abstract art, yet adapted its spontaneity, scale, and expressive use of color.

The Spinning, Spinning, Turning, Directing is a drama of bold exaggerations. Its principals are fantastic creatures whose silhouettes and unnatural colors distort their human, animal, or phantom origins. Sweeping curves, sharp zigzags, and steep diagonals rhythmically link the figures as they stand, sit, fall, or fly in their arbitrary space. A single tree in an arched opening focuses the scene, suggesting a cave that shelters its strange inhabitants from a brightly lit landscape.

Thompson was inspired by the play of good and evil, which creates both order and chaos in the relationships of man, animals, and nature. In his vision, nude female figures express nature’s sensuality, while birds symbolize power and freedom as well as his preoccupation with the ultimate flight of death. Thompson revered the Old Masters, including Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, and Poussin, and used their works as points of departure. In The Spinning, Spinning, Turning, Directing, he reinterpreted images from three of Goya’s Los Caprichos: Tale Bearers, Hobgoblins, and Rise and Fall. Whether sensual, spiritual, or tortured, Thompson’s paintings are metaphors of both the rational and irrational forces of nature.” - Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. African-American Art: 19th and 20th-Century Selections (brochure. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art).

Byron Browne (June 26, 1907 - 1961): Head, 1938 - oil on fiberboard (Smithsonian)

“Byron Browne was a central figure in many of the artistic and political groups that flourished during the 1930s. He was an early member of the Artists’ Union, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, and participated in the Artists’ Congress until 1940 when political infighting prompted Browne and others to form the break-away Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. Browne’s artistic training followed traditional lines. From 1925 to 1928, he studied at the National Academy of Design, where in his last year he won the prestigious Third Hallgarten Prize for a still-life composition. Yet before finishing his studies, Browne discovered the newly established Gallery of Living Art. There and through his friends John Graham and Arshile Gorky, he became fascinated with Picasso, Braque, Miró, and other modern masters.

Although Browne destroyed his early academic work shortly after leaving the National Academy, he remained steadfast in his commitment to the value of tradition, and especially to the work of Ingres. Browne believed, with his friend Gorky, that every artist has to have tradition. Without tradition art is no good. Having a tradition enables you to tackle new problems with authority, with solid footing.”

Browne’s stylistic excursions took many paths during the 1930s. His WNYC mural reflects the hard-edged Neo-plastic ideas of Diller, although a rougher Expressionism better suited his fascination for the primitive, mythical, and organic. A signer, with Harari and others, of the 1937 Art Front letter, which insisted that abstract art forms “are not separated from life,” Browne admitted nature to his art—whether as an abstracted still life, a fully nonobjective canvas built from colors seen in nature, or in portraits and figure drawings executed with immaculate, Ingres-like finesse. He advocated nature as the foundation for all art and had little use for the spiritual and mystical arguments promoted by Hilla Rebay at the Guggenheim Collection: When I hear the words non-objective, intra-subjective, avant-garde and such trivialities, I run. There is only visible nature, visible to the eye or, visible by mechanical means, the telescope, microscope, etc.”

Increasingly in the 1940s, Browne adopted an energetic, gestural style. Painterly brushstrokes and roughly textured surfaces amplify the primordial undercurrents posed by his symbolic and mythical themes. In 1945, Browne showed with Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes, David Hare, Hans Hofmann, Carl Holty, Romare Bearden, and Robert Motherwell at the newly opened Samuel Kootz Gallery. When Kootz suspended business for a year in 1948, Browne began showing at Grand Central Galleries. In 1950, he joined the faculty of the Art Students League, and in 1959 he began teaching advanced painting at New York University.” - Virginia M. Mecklenburg. The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction 1930–1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1989).

Byron Browne: Chinese Dancer, 1949 - oil on fiberboard, Smithsonian

“I feel the tradition of art to be behind every picture I do. There cannot be a new art without a solid basis in understanding of past art.” Browne, 1948, quoted in Rand, Byron Browne: Paintings & Drawings from the 30’s, 40’s, & 50’s, 1987

“Byron Browne created abstract images that often suggest recognizable forms. In Chinese Dancer the arrangement of shapes and lines evokes a tall figure in a swirling costume, captured in a fast-moving dance. He focused on the surface of the painting, creating a pattern that carries our eyes from the bright shape in the center, around the white diamonds and curves, to the stars scattered over the vivid pink background.” (Smithsonian label)

Byron Browne: Jester, 1952 - oil on canvas (Smithsonian)

“I do not view the world as a sad place in which to live; therefore my pictures are not of a pessimistic nature.” Browne, quoted in Rand, Byron Browne: Paintings & Drawings from the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, 1987

“Several of Byron Browne’s paintings show brightly colored images of jesters, clowns, circus performers, and dancers. Here, the expressive brushstrokes create a sense of movement in the peaks and bells of the jester’s hat, which wave in all directions. Browne abstracted the details of the jester’s profile to create a colorful jumble of shapes, from the zigzags of his eyelashes to the curved form of his cheekbone. The artist was an early proponent of abstract art in the 1930s, but when he painted Jester, in 1952, a younger crowd of “action painters” commanded the critics’ attention. The foolish character in this painting might symbolize Browne himself, whose work seemed dated by comparison. Or, the painter may have compared the dominance of abstract expressionism to the jester’s absurd rule of the court.” (Smithsonian label)

Roger Shimomura (b. June 26, 1939): Diary: December 12, 1941, 1980 - acrylic on canvas (Smithsonian)

“I genuinely understand the kind of pain that [racism] causes. And I think when you start seeing your offspring have offspring … you just hope to God they don’t ever have to experience that. There’s nothing wonderful or cute or professionally rewarding or anything about that.” The artist, quoted in “A Sansei Story,” Lawrence Journal-World (online), May 2, 2004

“Roger Shimomura’s Diary: December 12, 1941 was inspired by his grandmother’s diaries. Toku Shimomura was a midwife who delivered more than one thousand babies and was devoted to her Methodist church in Seattle. The Shimomuras were interned with other Japanese Americans at Camp Minidoka in Idaho. Toku wrote in her diary on December 12, 1941, that the government had permitted each internee to withdraw one hundred dollars from the bank “for our security of life, we who are enemy to them … I felt deeply in my mind America’s large heartedness …” In this painting a silhouette of Superman—-“Defender of Truth, Justice and the American Way”—-looms outside a geisha’s shoji-screened room. The image is a bitter comment on the “large heartedness” of the government, and the shadowy figure evokes both the supernatural heroes of Kabuki theater and the comic books that the artist grew up with. Shimomura donated this painting to the Museum on the fiftieth anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which required Japanese Americans to report to the camps” (“A Diary’s Tale,” Lawrence Journal-World, March 15, 1981; Roger Shimomura: Return of the Yellow Peril, exhibition catalogue, Cheney Cowles Museum, 1993).

Milton Glaser (b. June 26, 1929) is a graphic designer, best known for the I Love New York logo, his “Bob Dylan” poster (seen above), the “DC bullet” logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005, and the “Brooklyn Brewery” logo. He also founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968. (Wiki)