The post below is from 2015, after one of our visits to New Orleans. (Note to Americans and other world citizens: Visit New Orleans, and the rest of Louisiana, including Acadia and Vermillion Parish.)
I keep saying that among others, artists will save us. They really will.
There’s a lot of art in the world. A lot in New Orleans. A lot on Royal Street in New Orleans. But nothing in the world, in New Orleans, or on Royal Street, like the art of Chris Roberts-Antieau.
Having just discovered her work, I would say much more. But instead I’ll just say that she works in fabric. That she does what artists should do: delight you, inspire you, deliver the combination of joy and thoughtfulness that can be mistaken for mere craft or whimsy but is nothing less than art.
Only a few examples are shown here. Just visit the website of the Antieau Gallery. Visit the gallery on Royal Street in New Orleans, or in Santa Fe, or in Carmel-by-the-Sea. See her work at various museums.
I could talk about how special penguins are to the world and to me, or talk about the existential threats they face, or show pictures of impossibly cute penguin chicks. You can find that everywhere.
Instead, this is something you may not find anywhere.
An issue of Master Comics from 1943 features the story “Captain Marvel Jr. and the Crystal City of the Peculiar Penguins”.
I have included a few pages, which may be hard to read. Instead of my description, I will let the penguins explain.
CAPTAIN MARVEL JR.: But how do you keep your city so warm?
PENGUIN: Through our sun-crystal! It captures and magnifies the sun’s light and heat — a strange gas keeps the crystal aloft! Those thieves you fought had come down to steal our crystals from us! They had heard rumors of our invention from a lost explorer whom we saved years ago!
For centuries we have kept our civilization secret because we felt the world wasn’t ready to receive us! We feared your war-like ways and your unscrupulous merchant-bandits! We pretended to be ignorant and permitted your explorers to capture us for your zoos just to keep our secret!
The efforts of the bandits to steal the crystals is thwarted and they are defeated. Once they are captured, the penguins build an enclosure for them.
CAPTAIN MARVEL JR.: Frankly, I don’t know what to do with these crooks! If I take them back to jail, your secret will be out! Yet I can’t** let them go free!
PENGUIN: Leave that to us, Captain Marvel Jr. … we know what to do!”
You see? We’ve always wanted to start a zoo…and these animals will be our first specimens!
In early 1941, while war was already raging in Europe, but almost a year before Pearl Harbor, FDR gave one of the most famous speeches of the era and of American history. It was the 1941 State of the Union address, now known as the Four Freedoms speech. To bolster American support for our inevitable involvement in the war, he enunciated the Four Freedoms we would be fighting for: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear:
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.
Art turned out to play an important role in keeping these ideals front and center, especially as the prospect of American sacrifice became a reality. The most famous example may be a series of paintings by Norman Rockwell (above), who was then and maybe still the greatest American illustrator. The Library of Congress explains:
Taken from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 speech to Congress, the “Four Freedoms” –Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear–became a rallying point for the United States during WWII. Artist Norman Rockwell created four vignettes to illustrate the concepts. Rockwell intended to donate the paintings to the War Department, but after receiving no response, the painter offered them to the Saturday Evening Post, where they were first published on February 20, 1943. Popular reaction was overwhelming, and more than 25,000 readers requested full-color reproductions suitable for framing.
Some will say that these Four Freedoms are today controversial because we don’t seem to be able as a nation—as an American family—to agree on the strategies to maintain and attain those ideals. Those disagreements are undeniable, as are the related invective, disparagement, and even hatefulness that goes with them. But those disagreements can’t make us give up. On the contrary, they should send us back to the words of FDR, getting past the ideologies and labels, and really look within and at the family of Americans.
Do you really believe that these ideals are exclusive to you, and not shared by others of good will? Are your principles and affiliations so very important that you would sacrifice those ideals to be “right”? Or can we come to the table, dig deeper, and not leave until we have given up a little of our own self-importance and focused instead on getting a little closer to the country and world envisioned in the shared Four Freedoms? And maybe just a little closer to each other?
A White House photo celebrating a champion women’s sports team has drawn backlash due to the positioning of Donald Trump and a group of men, who overshadowed the female athletes by lining up in front of them.
The University of Georgia women’s tennis team was one of several collegiate teams to visit the White House on Tuesday to mark a recent championship win. In a photo shared by press aide Margo Martin, Donald Trump and five Georgia staffers and coaches took up the front row of a stage setup, with 11 women standing in the background on a riser.
The men standing alongside Trump were, from left to right: Georgia deputy athletic director Ford Williams, athletic director Josh Brooks, head coach Drake Bernstein, associate head coach Jarryd Chaplin and assistant coach Will Reynolds.
Georgia won the NCAA women’s tennis championship last May.
“A photo is worth a thousand words …” former tennis star Martina Navratilova wrote on X.
Martina Navratilova is right. This official minimizing of all women, including women of proven excellence, says so much about the view of the president, those around him, those who support him, many Republicans (some of whom see a biblical basis for this second-tier status), and some number of Americans.
Apparently, nobody, whether on the president’s staff or among the University of Georgia important men, was willing to suggest that maybe the actual winners deserved to be featured out front and to be individually greeted, just as the important men were.
A country like the U.S. that can’t officially establish legal equal rights for women, including something as simple and fair as equal pay for equal work, obviously has powerful people who don’t believe in that equality.
Next time you vote, ask every candidate what they think of this picture. It isn’t everything, but it is a good test. Take their response as one of many guides to the way they see the world, and if you are a woman, the way they see you.
It is January 1969. Fortune, one of the world’s most conservative business magazines, publishes a special issue about Youth in Turmoil. It then adapts the issue into a book, with an image of a flame on the cover.
The message is not, as you might expect, about how these ungrateful long-haired drug-addled rebels are destroying the country. On the contrary, the message is that these young people are trying to tell us something important and we should listen—before it’s too late.
Here is the introduction:
American youth is trying to tell us something important. The brightest of our young men and women are telling us that as far as they are concerned the choices for our society are narrowing rapidly. We can, at worst, look ahead to a future, very near, in which they lose all heart for our national effort, thus robbing it of its nerve, vitality, and point—a state of affairs in which they range themselves against us either in violence or in withdrawal. Or we can heed the cry of these young adults. Though often marred by shrillness, arrogance, and negativism, that cry is authentic and valid in its central message. It tells us that in our rush to well-being we have left much undone at the same time we have made so much more do-able. It tells us that we should rechannel our enormous energies to deal with the lengthening list of environmental and social grievances. If we can enlist these young idealists and they can enlist us, the nation will evolve toward a life style that once again sets a new standard for the world. I hope that this book, adapted from the January, 1969, special issue of FORTUNE, will contribute to that mutual enlistment.
LOUIS BANKS, MANAGING EDITOR, FORTUNE
Please read this word-for-word. It is extraordinary. This is a bible of the establishment, during one of our most anti-establishment times, acknowledging that many things are wrong—including environmental and social problems—and admitting that young people are trying to remind us of our responsibilities to make it right. If the establishment fails, Fortune says, “We can, at worst, look ahead to a future, very near, in which they lose all heart for our national effort, thus robbing it of its nerve, vitality, and point—a state of affairs in which they range themselves against us either in violence or in withdrawal.”
Consider how far we have come. Youth seems to be somewhat disaffected, maybe even having lost heart and been robbed of its nerve—but not exactly in turmoil. Much of the conservative establishment would now never dream of agreeing that we have justifiable environmental and social grievances, let alone that these should be aggressively addressed.
The Sixties are variously celebrated, trivialized, and even laughed at. Maybe it’s funny to see a Big Business publication like Fortune willing to open its eyes, look around, and decide that these kids just might have a point and we can do a whole lot better. Or maybe it’s a little sad that we don’t see more of that today.
Looking for comic book illustration for today, I found two options.
Everyone knows, or used to know, Smokey Bear.
Smokey Bear was created in 1944, in the face of wildfire threats during World War II. He was depicted pouring water on a campfire. The slogan “Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires” was introduced in 1947. Popular ever since as a conservation influencer, kids could at one time become Smokey Bear Junior Forest Rangers, receiving a membership kit that typically included a membership card, a Smokey Bear badge and a certificate. For city kids who lived far from any forest, this was exciting.
If you want to take a selfie with Smokey Bear, National Park Service bookstores sometimes display full size models.
If you are wondering why the theme song (below) is “Smokey THE Bear”, which is what he is often called now, it was to add an extra syllable for a musical beat. But “Smokey Bear” is his legal name.
Speaking of city kids learning about conservation, there is Mark Trail.
Mark Trail is a comic strip created in 1946 by Ed Dodd, an outdoorsman with a passion for nature and wildlife conservation. Mark Trail is a writer and photographer working for Woods and Wildlife magazine. The strip focused on environmental and wildlife conservation, with stories about poaching, habitat destruction, endangered species, and other ecological concerns woven into the plots. Mark Trail was known for punching out villains who were harming the environment. Reading the Sunday color comics, long before Earth Day, gave those same city kids their first introduction to conservation, just like Smokey did. The strip continues to run to this day.
Happy Earth Day from Smokey Bear, Mark Trail and me!
The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. –Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges is an illuminating insight into AI. That may not be immediately obvious. The story is not didactic or directly germane to the topic, unlike the proliferating texts about the specific applications, opportunities and implications of AI. Consider the story obliquely but brightly enlightening about the meaning of AI.
Below is a brief excerpt from the story. Any excerpt does disservice to the genius of Borges. This is meant to offer a taste; please read the whole story in one of his collections, such as Labyrinths.
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase….
There are five shelves for each of the hexagon’s walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say….
This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s palm. . . They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves….
Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variation with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): in other words, all that it is given to express, in all languages. Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad. . . The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who perhaps are not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero….
The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned the suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret. I have just written the word “infinite.” I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end — which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.
Some people love old cars. Others of us delight in old digital tech.
This is a page from the Neiman-Marcus Christmas 1969 catalog. The impeccably dressed N-M housewife is standing next to what appears to be an unusual table, but is actually the Honeywell Kitchen computer, which can be purchased for $10,000. (The apron will cost you another $28.) “If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute.” Indeed.
Here is something completely different from the era, prophetic rather than silly. It is Isaac Asimov, a science fiction great, advertising Radio Shack’s TRS-80.
Note that in the spirit of what goes around comes around, this is a pocket computer almost exactly the size of a smartphone—or is a smartphone a pocket computer exactly the size of a TRS-80? Either way, Neiman-Marcus and Honeywell were clueless, but Asimov and Radio Shack were not.
That would be a pretty good close for this post. Except that the following ad is irresistible, telling us something else about the early days of computing.
Just as cars were, and to some extent still are, sold by using sex, sometimes so were computers. This is an ad for a plotter, possibly the least sexy of all peripherals. The copy is mostly bone-dry and technical. But then there’s the trio of the model with her dress open to her navel, the headline “New, Fast, and Efficient!”, and the lead “The TSP-212 Plotting System is a real swinger.” $3,300 COMPLETE. Well, almost complete, as the model is presumably not included. But you know, that cool plotter just might attract one.
The poet’s role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
If there was a National Food Month, what would we say, what would we do? We could talk about food, hear about food, make food, share food and, of course, eat food.
This month, read poetry, recite poetry, write poetry, share poetry. You have a lot of options.
The proper close for this post might be to include one of my favorite poems. That is too easy and too hard. Instead, follow up with one of your favorite poems. If you don’t have any, this month is a good time to explore and discover them. They are out there, waiting just for you.
Millions of Americans believe that America’s past is better than anybody else’s future—including America’s own. That is inherent in an obsessive turning away from progress, from failing to adapt to twenty-first century (or even twentieth century) realities, and a strong longing for the comfortable but mythical past.
The irony is that civilizations with much more history than the U.S.—the youngest of all global powers—have had a much better time moving boldly and successfully into the future. This doesn’t mean that countries East and West have met all or most of the Herculean challenges they may face. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t people there looking back to the “good old days.” But for the most part, these countries have avoided being distracted by the substantial complexities of who and what they were, and focused on balancing that with who and what they can and must become.
The substantial past of some of those countries may actually be the antidote to nostalgia that has allowed those nations to move forward. After so many centuries of arguments between the backward-lookers and the forward-lookers, the very practical argument wins: seeing where you are going is the best way to avoid crashes, falling off cliffs, or just standing still while everyone else advances around you.
Maybe what America needs is a few more centuries of arguments, where the reactionaries and regressives hold sway and drive the nation into a crash or off a cliff. Maybe then America will know what the older heads in the world already know—that evolution moves forward and not back (if you believe in any kind of evolution), that you have to keep your eyes open, that you have to adapt or die. Unfortunately, those of us alive today, standing by helpless, won’t be able to enjoy the fruits of that learning. We may only be here for the hard lessons.
Bob Schwartz 