Nicholas Victor Artamonoff was a talented Russian amateur photographer who lived, studied and worked in Istanbul from the 1920s to the 1940s. He took many photos, mainly black-and-white, of architecture, archaeology, and street scenes, in Istanbul and also elsewhere in Turkey. A collection of images has now been made available by the Dumbarton Oaks Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives.
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posted by carter
on Mar 7, 2013 -
3 comments
At a time when the Lord of the Rings didn't exist as a film
or a book trilogy, Fritz Lang created the 5-hour-long film
Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungs, 1924), based on the 13th-century poem Die Nibelungenlied (The Song of the Nibelungs). A short clip of
Siegfried slaying the dragon was used as a trailer for the restored edition of the film.
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posted by ersatz
on Feb 3, 2013 -
28 comments
A
lot of once great [New York movie] theaters have been gutted and repurposed, most often into churches, pharmacies and gyms," writes The NYC Scout in
today's installment of
Scouting New York. "I’ve stopped in quite a few hoping to find the rare gem that’s survived, but have only been disappointed time and again."
Scouting New York has been featured in the blue many times (
1 2 3 4 5 6 ), but this entry is (literally, at least in my case) jaw-dropping. Just keep scrolling down.
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posted by Mothlight
on Jan 28, 2013 -
47 comments
Living Well Is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins is a classic New Yorker profile of Gerald and Sara Murphy, central figures of the Lost Generation social circle in 1920s France. F. Scott Fitzgerald created Dick and Nicole Diver, the central couple of Tender Is the Night, by merging himself and his wife Zelda, with the Murphys. Gerald was a
painter of note (examples:
1,
2,
3,
4), whose masterpiece
has been lost. After seven years of painting, Murphy stopped, and never restarted, for a
host of reasons, from the illness of his son to his
closeted gayness. But the Murphys are probably best known for "the special quality of their life." They hosted parties and
lived in a villa on the Mediterranean coast and were both painted by many artists,
including Pablo
Picasso. They were the subject of a
recent biography and an
essay collection.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 11, 2013 -
10 comments
"In 1911, the
Saenger Brothers, Abe and Julian, operators of a drug business at Louisiana and Milam streets, decided to enter the amusement field. They were impressed with [Shreveport movie theatre operator E.V. Richards] and induced him to join them in their new field of endeavor ... In 1912 the Saenger Amusement Company was organized with Saenger Brothers, E.V. Richards and L. M. Ash as the stockholders. Richards continued as manager and an expansion policy was adopted which linked
Texarkana, Monroe and Alexandria with
Shreveport and thus formed the first
Saenger chain of theatres in this area ... The company moved to New Orleans where
the Strand Theatre, a building of
magnificent modernity, was formally opened on July 4, 1917 ... In 1924 the company again inhaled deeply before exhaling a new record of expansion that established branches in 12 southern states. In 1926 and '27 further expansion took the company into Cuba, Jamaica, Panama and Costa Rica. During the expansion peak 320 theatres were involved in the holding company." Sadly,
few remain. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Nov 8, 2012 -
8 comments
The New Dressmaker;
With complete and fully illustrated instructions on every point connected with sewing, dressmaking and tailoring, from the actual stitches to the cutting, making, altering, mending, and cleaning of clothes for ladies, misses, girls, children, infants, men and boys; The Butterick Publishing Co., 1921; 168 p. illus. [more inside]
posted by applemeat
on Sep 16, 2012 -
12 comments
"A maverick theater and industrial designer,
Norman Bel Geddes is best remembered for creating the undisputed hit of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Mounted in the midst of the Great Depression, the Fair focused on America’s promise of a utopian tomorrow. Geddes’s
Futurama, a piece of “immersion theater,” took six hundred visitors at a time on a swooping, simulated airplane ride across America circa 1960."
"The City of Tomorrow, a model of Manhattan that Geddes created, in 1937, to promote Shell Oil Company’s new “motor-digestible” gasoline, is often cited as [
Futurama's inspiration.]
But Futurama’s beginnings actually harken back much further, to the meticulous, insanely detailed private games he created in the 1920s and early ’30s for the amusement of his friends."
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posted by zamboni
on May 6, 2012 -
15 comments
“The flapper movement is not a craze, but something that will stay,” the author maintained. “Many of the phrases now employed by members of this order will eventually find a way into common usage and be accepted as good English.” [more inside]
posted by timory
on Apr 10, 2011 -
83 comments
Don't Make Excuses - Make Good! Between World Wars I and II, the U.S. economy was booming - workers had choices and employers competed for their time. How to motivate and gain loyalty from a labor force that knew it could walk out the door and find more work soon?
Charles Mather, head of a family printing business in Chicago, offered employers a solution: the
first motivational posters for the private workplace market. Printed between 1923 and 1929, Mather's "
Work Incentive Posters" used strong imagery and short, clear messaging to encourage workplace values like
teamwork, punctuality, safety, and loyalty. Today, some of his 350 designs can be seen in
traveling exhibitions and
poster galleries, and
Antiques Road Show - or you can soak up some motivation from his modern-day successors at
Successories - or
generate your own.
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posted by Miko
on Oct 12, 2010 -
25 comments
The opening shots of 1920s New York City are wonderful, then you get a zany high-speed Harold Lloyd blazing down the avenues, and that's fun to watch, but the real killer is the horse-drawn trolley absolutely
tearing-ass through lower Manhattan, full gallop. Ends badly. Then it's over to San Francisco for one last bit of homicidal vehicular activity with a bus. Well, they sure don't drive
like they used to!
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posted by flapjax at midnite
on May 25, 2008 -
37 comments
T.R.A.N.S.I.T. is, by a wide margin, my favorite animated short ever produced. Set in the art deco Europe of the 1920's and (and released in 1997) it tells the story of a journey throughout several major vacation destinations of a wealthy tycoon, his young wife with wandering eyes, and a murderous turn of events. The story is told in reverse, from the final stage of the "vacation" back through each prior stop, and the artwork for each segment is painted in the style of the luggage travel sticker for that stop.
posted by jonson
on Sep 2, 2007 -
14 comments
America's worst school violence ever was not a
recent event, but the
Bath School disaster of 1927.
Andrew Kehoe, a school board member upset with his tax bill, used dynamite and some
pyrotol from WWI-era military surplus to blow himself up along with the elementary school of
Bath Township, Michigan, leaving 45 dead and 58 injured. See a
1927 book on the disaster, a
list of victims, the
coroner's inquest, a
historical marker, a
memorial park, an
oral history from a witness, and a 1920s
KKK rant denouncing Kehoe as an agent of the Roman Catholic conspiracy.
posted by jonp72
on Oct 5, 2006 -
14 comments
