Artists' Illustrated Letters

Getting the Picture is a delightful exhibition of illustrated letters selected from the collections of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. From thank you notes to love letters, travel accounts, graphic instructions and other and various missives and hello-theres, they have a lot of personality and make my letters look embarrassingly vanilla. They range in date from the early 19th century into the 1990s and are as unique and fascinating as the artists who created them.

There were so many good ones, I had a hard time choosing. Nonetheless, I managed to cobble up a few for you here.

You can click on the images to read the letters.


















Edith Schloss to Philip Pearlstein, Mar. 25, 1981


















Joseph Lindon Smith to Parents, June 15, 1894


















Waldo Peirce to Sally Jane Davis, Apr. 25, 1943


















Red Grooms and Mimi Gross Grooms to Elisse and Paul Suttman and Edward C. Flood, 1968


















Max Bohm to Emilie Bohm, Sept. 14, 1899 (page 1)


















Yves Saint-Laurent to Alexander Liberman, ca. 1970 June 7


















Warren Chappell to Isabel Bishop, Sept. 6, 1982


















Gladys Nilsson to Mimi Gross., 1969 Apr. 4

There are also a number of letters from well-known artists including, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Winslow Homer, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Andy Warhol - however, in the case of this exhibition, I found that generally, the more famous the artist, the less interesting the letter. Your mileage will likely vary on this, so have a look and see for yourself. You could certainly use up a few hours enjoying these.

thanks to the Glasgow School of Art Library (an excellent resource)

Gilgamesh for Apes

lexigram for "Enkidu"

Gilgamesh for Apes (all of it; readable by both humans and great apes)

Primate Poetics:

The question becomes: can the ape move away from primordial wordsoup to the solid state of conventional literature. Great apes do have what it takes to be literati: they have self-awareness and empathy, they can deceive and play roles, they can have pleasure, they can mourn and feel sad and lonely, they have great sense of class dynamics... They have other assets in which they surpass us, like a superb short-term memory and a good ear. In fact apes are already telling stories. Gorilla Michael has given us what his keepers believe to be an account of the death of his mother at the hand of poachers: "Squash meat gorilla. Mouth tooth. Cry sharp-noise loud. Bad think-trouble look-face. Cut/neck lip (girl) hole".

brought to us by Social Fiction (updated Oct. 2008)

Mary Texanna Loomis: 1921

Shorpy:

December 31, 1921. "Miss Texanna Loomis." Mary Texanna Loomis, founder and proprietor of the Loomis Radio School in Washington, D.C. National Photo Company Collection glass negative, Library of Congress.

Mary Texanna Loomis (short bio)

Hobo Code

In the fraternal spirit of the road, hobos have developed a set of symbols to communicate local conditions. Important information concerning things like food and drink, the disposition of the residents, the presence of dogs and police and even the state of the local jail was codified into a universally adopted picture-language. Hobo signs are still used today. Considering the state of the economy, it might be helpful to buff up.

from Fran's Hobo Page

stray bullets

Antiquities smuggling: Growing problem at US ports Three years ago, an elderly Italian man pulled his van into a South Florida park to sell some rare, 2,500-year-old emeralds plundered from a South American tomb. But Ugo Bagnato, an archaeologist, didn't know his potential customer was a federal agent. (via)

Tourist who found Stone Age axes rewarded £20,000 A British tourist who unearthed four Stone Age axes on a beach in Brittany has been put forward for a prize worth more than £20,000 by the Ministry of Culture for not keeping the treasure. (via)

CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers Corporate India is in shock after a mob of workers bludgeoned to death the chief executive who sacked them from a factory in a suburb of Delhi. (via)

also:
Cheap Chinese lederhosen anger Germans
a couple of good lists this week: Top 10 Things That Are Surprisingly Good For You & 10 Odd Discontinued Olympic Sports (and don't forget drawing and watercolors)
Flashback: The One Elevator Trick Every Traveler Should Know
Neil Armstrong makes rare speech as NASA turns 50
Erase Cell Phone Data: Free Data Eraser (via)

viddy:
The Mike Wallace Interview: Frank Lloyd Wright (via)
The arty farty show
Sati Audiovisual (excellent VJ performance)

stray bullets

Life in Somalia's pirate town This is a more elaborate and lucrative operation than you might imagine. Quite the cottage industry they have going on there, complete with a support system and an economy of its own.

Thanks for the advice on Josh I wanted to thank all of you who took the time to email me with your comments on how best to deal with Josh. They were so good, I thought I would share a few of them with everyone. Including the email addresses of those who were bold enough to use real email addresses. Josh realizes his comments were wrong, he understands why people are upset. He knows he has made a mistake, has apologized and will work with us. Beyond that, its a private issue. What about the people who gave me the following advice? Mark Cuban posts some of the emails he received in reference to the Josh Howard situation, complete with addies.

The future of online video The Official Google Blog weighs in. In ten years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication. The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected. Even more people will have the opportunity to record and share even more video with a small group of friends or everyone around the world. (via)

Journalist retraces the steps of the original 'Zen' author in an engrossing tale Re-enacting the journey from Minneapolis to San Francisco chronicled by Pirsig in his cult classic, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," Mark Richardson digs deep to unearth the motives behind his tormented mentor's search for quality while embarking on a search of his own. (via)

Deletionpedia is an archive of about 63,555 pages which have been deleted from the English-language Wikipedia. Deletionpedia is not a wiki: you cannot edit the pages uploaded here. An automated bot uploads pages as they are deleted from Wikipedia.

Frank Deford: Blemish, Anyone? Bets Show Dark Side Of Tennis (audio and text) In the many years I covered tennis, I heard it all: who was pulling the strings, who was double-dealing, who was taking drugs, who was sleeping with whom. But for all the genial corruption, never did I hear — or know anyone else who heard — that some player fixed a match for money, until Internet betting arrived a few years ago. And, I'll bet you didn't know that Humphrey Bogart was the first person to say "Tennis anyone?"

also:
Britain's luckiest man cheated death 14 times
What's new at the Internet Archive
Personality variation by region (USA) (maps) (via)

Sending and Receiving

The first radio lecture being delivered by radio from Tufts University, 1922.

tout-fait (The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal):

Everything that we call electronic mass media today begins with the sending and receiving of signals without any material connection, with the miracle of "wireless" that started shortly before 1900. From 1920 on, this transmission technique of then primarily strategic military use develops into radio broadcasting. As a result, material things disappear from mass distribution and the media turn into something "immaterial". The uniformity of all products for all people caused by industrialization - as is expressed by the lexical term "ready made" - is only a preliminary stage towards a globally synchronized perception of a "radio-made" experience world.

This is one of the best articles I've read all year. If you're a fan or student of radio, media, communication, the Internet, hacking, the occult, Duchamp, Cage, Baudelaire or Baudrillard, do not miss it. Although it dates back to 2000, it is no less relevant to the present day.

via :::wood s lot:::

George Christopher: 1910

Shorpy:

Nashville, November 1910. "George Christopher, Postal Telegraph messenger #7, fourteen years old. Been at it over three years. Does not work nights." Photograph and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine.

That's me peeking around the corner.

An obliquely related, but irresistible quote from Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown:

Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the telephone company did not employ women for the sake of advancing female liberation. AT&T did this for sound commercial reasons. The first telephone operators of the Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys. They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up around the phone office, dunned customers for bills, and made phone connections on the switchboard, all on the cheap.

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described them as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission. And worst of all they played clever tricks with the switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and so forth.

This combination of power, technical mastery, and effective anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage boys.

Brother's Firefight

From JRPetee:

My brother is an MP over in Afghanistan. He was on post on April 21st. He decided to give us a call, just to let us know how he was doing.

Nobody was home so he got the answering machine, and hung up. Just then, they started getting shot at. Somehow, his phone re-dialed, and we got this on our answering machine. He is okay.

Language alert.

Story

via linkfilter.net

The Whirl

Visual thinking guru, Dave Gray provides a demonstration of visual language in relation to The Whirl, which is the dense cloud of noise, signal, data and information that swarms and bundles around us in a seemingly chaotic manner. Visual language can cut through this fog and cross lingual and cultural barriers as a sort of global auxiliary language, something we'll need as The Whirl intensifies. (The Whirl is so much more euphonious and comprehensive than terms like 'ubiquitous computing' or 'information overload.')

Images are the primal language. William S. Burroughs's 'Language is a Virus' thread explores the supplanting of the visual with the verbal.

And yet still, we are highly dependent on visual information. So much so, that we often equate our thinking with it. When have you ever heard of a scientific theory based on smell or taste? Studies of sensory data are always conducted with graphical outputs. You don't have an olfactor for your computer. When we communicate verbally that we understand, we often say, "I see." It was a big jump for many of us as kids to go from looking at the pictures to reading the text. We observe holidays and monitor the situation.

As visually oriented creatures, we'd be well served by developing a more methodical and informed skill set for communicating visually. We already do this in many ways. However, as a medium that is understood, mastered and universally adopted, visual language is still in its childhood. I look forward to seeing this kid grow up.