Raymond Taylor, son of the third Mormon prophet John Taylor, holding the Dimick Huntington Cane in an undated photo, republished by Steven Barnett in “The Canes of the Martyrdom,” 1981
In June 1844, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, where they were being held in jail for treason. [Joseph, who in addition to being the founding president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was also the mayor of the Mormon-dominated city of Nauvoo, had destroyed the printing press of an anti-Mormon/anti-Smith newspaper and declared martial law. This led to his arrest for treason against the state of Illinois, but somehow none of that is particularly important to this blog post.]
The bodies of Joseph and Hyrum were brought back to Nauvoo, 22 miles away, in hastily constructed coffins of oak lumber. They were buried in a Smith family home, then moved to another site seven months later.
The blood-soaked wood from the temporary coffins was cut up and distributed to a few church leaders and friends of the Smiths by their widows, to be made into canes. When the bodies were reinterred, clippings of the Smiths’ hair were collected, distributed, and incorporated into the heads of some of the canes. These canes became known as Canes of the Martyrdom, and in a religious culture that officially eschews such things, they have become ersatz relics.
This couture cape in peach paduasoy and the sequin and crystal embroidered chiffon gown are both from Jeanne Lanvin, circa 1961. The cape, at least, is attributed to Oscar Renta Fiallo, who that year left his apprenticeship with Cristóbal Balenciaga to work with Antonio del Castillo, the Spanish designer brought to Paris to revive Lanvin. Both garments belonged to Baroness Aino de Bodisco.
I had to look up paduasoy, which is maybe a Spanish term for peau de soie, a variant of silk satin. Which is absolutely the least important thing in this situation. Because the auction listing of these two items also includes a copy of the mindboggling, handwritten pledge the 24-year-old man who would become known as Oscar de la Renta made to Bodisco in June 1956.
As I try to manage my news intake, I have been rescued and refreshed by First Light Radio, artist Man Bartlett’s monthly music show on East Village Radio. It’s live on the third Friday of the month, from 8-10AM, and the archive is growing, but it’s still early, so it’s small. Fortunately, there is a whole discography to fall back into. I confess, I’ve never opened my cassette tapes of any of the Space On Earth recordings; I just use the mp3 technology.
James Bridle responds to the Schelling Architecture Foundation’s rescinding of an award because of Bridle’s public support of a cultural boycott of Israeli institutions that support genocide.
Getting Hannah Arendt quoted back at you should be a wakeup call for Germans, but I guess not yet.
Germany is far from alone in this situation. The far right, and the denial of genocide that accompanies it, are on the march everywhere. But the logic of Strike Germany is simple: if it is illegal in Germany to call for cultural change in Israel, then it becomes necessary to call for cultural change in Germany itself. Late enough to be ashamed, but never too late, I sign my name.
Because we have some people from there, a ways back. And when a name like Mozingo turns up in Nahunta in your family history, it sticks in your mind.
And now I want to make Nahunta: Mi Gente t-shirts, which me and maybe like one cousin would appreciate.
Or maybe I need to make a new visit. Maybe the Nahunta Pork Center is just the most front-facing participant of a larger hardworking community of pork processors and their families. They are no less me gente than the farmers I came from.
Maybe Joan Didion’s 1975 commencement speech at the University of California Riverside was better when it was ‘lost’ and all we had were the YOLO excerpts from the end. Well, it’s all here now:
I think what you might be blinded for, what you ought to watch out for, is the habit of saying no, the habit of not believing anybody or anything. You’ve got to watch out for moving into a world where you don’t think there’s any objective reality, where there’s only you and that tree you just planted. There’s an objective reality, there is an objective social reality. Take it on faith.
All I want to tell you today, really, is not to do that. Not to move into that world where you’re alone with yourself and your tree. I want to tell you to live in the messy world, throw yourself into the convulsion of the world.
I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.
Hhmm! While I’m glad she made a plug for reality, the idea of graduating from college, and Joan Didion driving out to Riverside to say don’t try to make the world better frankly sucks.
I’d seen Issey Miyake’s 132 5 Project clothes, but not the lamps. Now here is a lamp.
In 2010 Miyake and his Reality Lab groupies developed a collection of one-piece of recycled polyester textile, geometric origami-based garments, paying as much attention to how they looked folded flat as to how they worked on a body. Like his Pleats Please and APOC (A Piece Of Cloth) concepts, 123 5 was an experiment with material, process, and form without too much concern for how it looked on, because it always just looks like: whatever, you’re wearing Miyake.
[Looking now for an image to post, I can also say it didn’t matter to Miyake how it looked on a mannequin, in a photo, in a store, or what a press release said. The charitable explanation is that it privileges the physical experience with the product.]
Anyway, Miyake brought this folding-focused concept into a lighting collection at Artemide called IN-EI. Typically written as In’ei (陰翳), Miyake told Artemide it means “shadow, shadiness, nuance.” But the term is most directly associated with 陰翳礼讃 (In’ei Raisan), “In Praise of Shadows,” Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s foundational 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics, which had a huge influence on Japan’s own sense of cultural exceptionalism vis à vis the Modernism of the West.
Another reference that is very unmentioned is Isamu Noguchi’s Akari series, which brought a modernist and modernizing sensibility to Japan’s long tradition of paper lanterns. Many of which also fold flat, obviously. My long-simmering fixation with the Akari arc from lamps to “light sculptures” is probably what made me notice this lamp in the first place. And seeing the stacked rhombus lamps in this Miyake boutique, it’s clear Noguchi was on Artemide’s mind, too.
Artemide and Issey Miyake, making sure “Each lampshade is created using 2 or 3D mathematic principals” since this pic was taken the NYC store in 2012. It was even stenciled on the wall lmao.
However long this cruise ship napkin-shaped table lamp was in production, I don’t know, but the IN-EI Collection currently only has four pieces in it, and this is currently not one of them. Its name, Hoshigame, translates as star tortoise, and yes, its shape does look like the shell of a Burmese Star Tortoise. So maybe in 2015, when the Kemono Friends manga dropped, and an Indian Star Tortoise was among the exotic animals in the magic zoo that turned into kawaii little girls, Artemide decided to quietly excuse itself from the search results.
As long as you know to search for Hoshigame, though, you will not need to rush to buy this one in Paris. Turns out they’re all over the place, at prices ranging from etsy cheap to 1st dibs ridiculous.
cane head and spear tip, from the late Nara or early Heian period [c. 800 CE], found at the top of Mt Tsurugi in 1907, image: toyama-bunkaisan
In 1907, Yoshitaro Shibasaki and his team successfully climbed Mount Tsurugi, which was regarded as the last unclimbed mountain in Japan. However, they found a metal cane decoration and a sword on the top of the mountain, and it turned out that someone had reached the top before them. A later scientific investigation revealed that the metal cane decoration and sword dated from the late Nara period to the early Heian period and that shugenja had climbed Mount Tsurugi more than 1,000 years ago.
Shugendō is a mountain ascetic religious practice that emerged in the 8th century in Japan, that synthesizes Shintō, Buddhism, and various local spiritual elements. Because of its integrationist nature it was banned in the Meiji era when government land surveyors found that the ascetics [shugenja] beat them to the top of Mount Tsurugi by a thousand years. [via CraigMod‘s newsletter, where he discusses missing a Shugendō retreat because of XOXO and typhoons.
At the apex of the Palais de Tokyo’s staircase, beside the bas-reliefs of the nine muses, there’s Munro choreographing the show, doling out groups of models like the conductor of a heavenly human orchestra. Here they come: Tyrone Dylan Susman in a sheer jumpsuit and bold-shouldered coat. Allanah Starr in a draped and caped prong dress. Charles Star Matadin in a gilded hood and Kat Q in sheer layers with shoulders that arc upward toward the sky. And here parades an assemblage of bodies on a litter supported by ten strongmen.
I tried but this version of the Emblem of Tibet in exile does not help date this holiday card from HH The Dalai Lama. image: juliensauctions
There are literally like a hundred Christmas cards from various configurations of the British royal family in this ex-countess’s estate sale—here’s one of several with skeevy Prince Andrew—but there is only one holiday card from His Holiness The Dalai Lama, and it rocks.
Austrian refugee and concert pianist Maria Donata Nanetta Paulina Gustava Erwina Wilhelmine Stein married to George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood and first cousin to the Queen, in 1949, and after her divorce in 1967, Countess Harewood kept in touch with her friend the Queen. Which accounts for staying on the Windsors’ mailing list, but not the Dalai Lama’s. Her later marriage to a politician Jeremy Thorpe doesn’t help either.
So it probably involves her son David Lascelles, now the 8th Earl, who produced Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy, a four-hour, meditative, verité documentary on Tibetan monastic life in exile in 1979. Lascelles also commissioned Bhutanese monks to build a stupa at Harewood in 2004 as part of a spiritual reparation, a way to account for his family’s legacy of enslavement and exploitation without necessarily impacting its actual fortune or the 18th century country house it funded.
Which is all well and good, and enslavers need all the karmic help they can get. But the point here is, the coolest Christmas card around was sent by the exiled human incarnation of the Buddha to an Ashkenazi Jewish refugee-turned-ex-countess months away from either of their actual new year’s days. [update: at least TWICE.]
I want a first edition of Moby Dick, but I think the psychic price of actually ever buying one will be too high.
While surfing around to see how the copy for sale at Christie’s rn stacks up, I fall into a briar patch of rarity, condition reports, restoration and repair, inscription and annotation, and cutthroat antiquarian connoisseurship.
I really did just think I could post two pics of sweet-looking flags and be done, but nooo.
Because as a not country, Antarctica doesn’t have an official flag. There are eight territorial claims made by seven sovereign states, and some of those have their own flags. There’s a flag-shaped “emblem of the Antarctic Treaty System,” negotiated beginning in 1958 and enacted in 1961, which supersedes those sovereign claims, which is a map of the continent divided up into twelve longitudinal slices. A similar continent-shaped flag, minus the slicing, on a lighter blue, was inspired by the UN flag. It was designed by Graham Bartram in 1996 for a CD-ROM atlas, using new satellite imagery.
In 2002, Edward Kaye took two dozen of Bartram’s flags on an expedition cruise to Antarctica, where he flew and distributed them at five nations’ bases [Brazil, Chile, Argentina, UK, and Ukraine]. His account of the trip was published in the proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Vexillology, held in Stockholm in 2003. Since 2015 Bartram’s design has been used for the Antarctica Flag emoji: 🇦🇶.
Kaye’s brief history of Antarctic flags included a mockup [above, left] of a possible Antarctic flag flown by Ernest Shackleton on his 1907-09 Nimrod expedition. He was citing Flags of The World [fotw.net, now defunct], where flag nerds of the world posted their latest information about the world’s flags. An archived version of the Antarctic Flags page reveals that in 1999 someone saw a hand-colored edition of Shackleton’s account of the Nimrod expedition on Antiques Roadshow which included a five-band blue & white flag. Kaye’s diagram was based on the gif [above, right] António Martins made in 2000 for fatw.net using a different blue.
But this flag did not exist, or at least, it was not published in Shackleton’s book. The Google Books scan of p. 52 [above] shows three black flags of the type Shackleton mentions throughout the account, which were used to mark supply depots.
In 2018, Antarctic contractor Evan Townsend proposed the flag I thought I’d write my quick & easy blog post about, the True South Flag. Townsend’s proposal focused on drawing attention to Antarctic conservation and the people who work toward it: “The future of this continent depends on humans, which is why we need a flag not just for a landmass, but for a people and a community.” Compared to Bartram’s design, which has been propagated via technological flanking maneuvers, the True South flag seeks to build credibility through use and support on the ice.
It draws attention to both the historical territorial claims on Antarctica by other sovereign states, and the treaty that precludes such claims and guarantees the continent’ exceptional status as a peaceful, collaborative, non-state. But it does that, ironically, by rallying what had long been missing from the equation: a permanent, not to say indigenous, population.
Which is partly why True South’s resemblance to the flag of Greenland, the other polar flag I’d thought to post about, stuck in my mind. With the advent of home rule in 1978, Greenlanders sought a distinct identity apart from the legacy of Danish colonialism. The design [above] that was eventually ratified in 1985 was by Thue Christiansen. [It was immediately discovered to be identical to the logo of a Danish rowing club, but they said they didn’t mind.]
It is sort of mind-blowing to realize the digital shitstorm that has engulfed Christie’s the week before some of the year’s biggest auctions. I mean, I certainly didn’t need to hear from Todd Levin to know that the website had gone offline.
But it was only by clicking through the email sent from CEO Guillaume Cerutti that the scope of their predicament began to sink in. That email was, at least sent from the Christie’s email server.
She reported on the documentary almost two months ago, and Macdonald told her the same fascinating-to-me thing he told Josh Slater-Williams, that Galliano’s Fall 2022 show was about being the subject of a documentary. Which, if you look at that show, is all kinds of problematic. But.
She also adds so much more context: that it was Anna Wintour who dangled a Galliano documentary on the hook for several years until a director—Macdonald—bit. And crucially, as I read it, that the whole thing pivoted on documentary’s backers at Dior—and LVMH.
The reputation being laundered by the documentary is not Galliano’s—or not just Galliano’s—but Galliano’s collections for Dior. So cooperating effusively was, Macdonald suggested, “a great way for them to say, ‘Okay, we’ve laid that to rest.’ And I think, so, for Dior and for John, I think that was their agenda.”
Galliano near the Met Gala but not at it, fitting Kim Kardashian into a Margiela dress, screenshot via Mikelle Street’s social media
“It is also, of course,” wrote Tashjian-Wise, “an agenda that allows them to make more money off Galliano-designed products.” And so it seems unsurprising that weeks after the documentary dropped, Galliano was declared “the real winner of the Met Gala.” Tashjian-Wise notes that Galliano dressed six celebrities for the Met Gala, including Kim Kardashian, and Zendaya—twice. The actress skipped the co-chairs receiving line at the top of the Met’s stairs to take a second lap outside, wearing a vintage Galliano-era Givenchy.
Both Tashjian-Wise and Chantal Fernandez at The Cut reported rumors that Galliano had been Anna Wintour’s and curator Andrew Bolton’s intended subject this year’s Costume Institute exhibition. After someone at the Met nixed the plan last year, Bolton had to throw together a collection exhibition about spring florals based on a dystopian Philip K. Dick story.
A Wintour-orchestrated, LVMH-sanctioned documentary. A triumphant LVMH-sponsored museum retrospective, and reported “suggestions” that Galliano would return to LVMH. The plan really was going to be, put the antisemitic outrage outrage to rest, and use the Met Gala to launch a rebooted Galliano. The world—and some museum trustees, apparently—have intervened, but it does cast a stark light on the Met Gala as a wholly instrumentalized tool of the luxury industry.
Fernandez’ article on Andrew Bolton gets into the Costume Institute’s weird governance and curatorial shenanigans, but we’ve never gotten a breakdown of the Met Gala’s actual value proposition as the the world’s most extravagant sponcon. It’s a Condé Nast-branded, pay-to-play fashion show, combined with a party giving Vogue advertisers both content opportunities and facetime with celebrities, and the venue gets a cut of the door. And we’re all either too starstruck or too grateful for the fundraising to acknowledge how, beneath the museum’s sheer veil of cultural credibility, the Met Gala is naked.
1 The “How” of Knowledge 2 Inventory-ing 3 Field of Action – Space for Play
Seeing <-> Making: Room for Thought is a “picture book of philosophy” that aims to “make theory visible” by “reorient[ing] the space of the book” to make theory in our “image-based information age” visible in service of “collective imagination and social action.”
Is that an Angelus Novus I see before me?
I have to use so many quotes because I have been pondering the extraordinary Benjaminian arcade-shaped announcement/object for a couple of months already, and I can barely wrap my head around it what this will actually be. But I am now clear on the existence of a book launch at Triple Canopy in a couple of weeks.
Essays by leading visual culture scholar Susan Buck-Morss are configured into a network for expanded thought by leading t-shirt-as-discourse god Kevin McCaughey (Boot Boyz Biz) and leading who-else-would-put-together-a-book-like-this designer and publisher Adam Michaels (Inventory Press).
4 Visual Studies & Global Imagination 5 The Task 6 Critical Distance
7 The Gift of the Past 8 Class Quilt 9 Seeing Global
These numbered lists are, I believe, the twelve analogic spaces of the book, around which readers will be invited to expand their theoretical fields. I transcribed them from the arcade model.
“Benjamin as Method / PSC” is one of Buck-Morss’ graduate polisci courses at CUNY
Other elements of the project, visuals and text appeared in the last Boot Boyz Biz drop, which took place while I was driving, and thus I missed every single thing. It is rare to get a second bite at the BBB cherry, but between a trade book and a launch event with a merch table, I’m making room for thoughtful swag.
