Ruination & Despair

“No dancing, clamouring, quarrelling, fisticuffings or indulging in excessive drinking and creating disturbances in public places for the sake of keeping a peaceful and comfortable environment. Guests are not permitted to bring pets and poultry into the hotel.”

 — Notice posted in a hotel room in Beijing, China, as reported in Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See (1990), p. 140.

After ignoring the newly inaugurated Franklin Roosevelt almost entirely in 1933, Life suddenly embraced the Democratic president in 1934 with several openly admiring cartoons. But as its editorial line shifted in a conservative direction in 1935, the magazine mostly ignored him again, only to launch into a run of implacably hostile cartoons in 1936. At the same time, 1934 and 1935 marked new lows in the output of cartoons related, even indirectly, to the Depression, while 1936 saw a slight uptick, as the magazine lit into Roosevelt and the New Deal. (Continue reading . . .)

Here at Archelaus we’re not all that wild about seeing animals in cages, which explains why we’ve spent little time over the years exploring the National Zoo, even though it’s nearby and free.

On the other hand, we are big fans of the kiwi — the nocturnal, flightless, and generally peculiar national bird of New Zealand. And since I don’t personally foresee any trips to the Antipodes in my future, it seemed about time to take advantage of the Zoo’s “Meet a Kiwi” program.

I am pleased to say it was worth my time. The kiwi keeper duly produced Manaia — a handsome adult North Island Brown Kiwi who hatched at the Zoo in February 2006 — from a carrier and placed him in an open-topped glass case. The latter had a thick floor of soil, just crawling with juicy worms that Manaia eagerly began to devour. I had spent a fair amount of time reading about kiwis on the Zoo’s website, so I was glad that the keeper had interesting facts to add to what I already knew. One thing I had not fully appreciated was just how alarmingly large a fully-developed kiwi egg is relative to the bird itself. It is frankly astonishing that the female has any room left inside her body cavity for internal organs! I was also intensely interested to learn that DNA studies have established that kiwis are not at all closely related to the regrettably now-extinct moas.

After about fifteen minutes, Manaia had eaten his fill of worms and seemed anxious to find a way out of his glass case. The keeper then dismissed us and returned him to his carrier.

Apart from meeting a kiwi, I was fascinated to see that the Zoo had construction workers in captivity — presumably in response to news reports that the species is now endangered. The workers were housed in an impressively large enclosure, replete with earth-moving equipment and every sort of loose rubbish, just like in the wild.

Archelaus makes its headquarters in Cleveland Park, a pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C., which was developed as one of the capital’s first “streetcar suburbs” starting in the 1890s. Our local Historical Society recently sponsored the restoration of Cleveland Park’s fifteen antique police and fire call boxes as public art. The cast-iron call boxes had been neglected since the 1970s, when the introduction of 911 emergency service rendered them obsolete. Now they have been spruced up and decorated with attractive paintings and instructive text.

In any case, yesterday morning I happened upon the call box at the corner of Quebec Place and Reno Road, adorned with a verdant landscape. The accompanying text noted:

An 1897 study for Washington, D.C. by the renowned landscape architecture firm of Frederick Law Olmsted influenced the layout of many streets in Cleveland Park. Rather than following the standard grid pattern, streets east of 34th Street (Reno Road) and north of Newark Street are curvilinear, irregular in block size, conform to the natural hilly contours of the land, and reflect the small tributaries of Rock Creek.

I found this information interesting, because the original plan for downtown Washington, created by Pierre Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825), was based on a rigidly rectilinear grid, intersected with diagonal avenues. It is a clear product of the Enlightenment, with a unyieldingly rationalist concept and a strictly neo-Classical aesthetic, a sharp reaction against the disorderly, unplanned streets and crooked byways of medieval and early modern cities. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, city planners were seemingly prepared to react, in their turn, against the geometric severity of L’Enfant’s vision in favor of an organic, curvilinear aesthetic more in keeping with, say, the Art Nouveau movement of their own day.

I am even more intrigued, however, by the reflection that better than half a century later, in the profoundly different cultural milieu of the postwar period, planners of sprawling suburban subdivisions evidently embraced this curvilinear aesthetic anew. It must have been clear, even to them, how oppressively regimented, soulless, and sterile a rectilinear suburbia would be. Not that the ubiquitous curvy streets and culdesacs of the suburbs and exurbs really solved the problem. It may be an unfair example, but I am reminded of the aerial opening shot of the relentlessly suburban Upper Whinging in the second Harry Potter film, which conveys nothing so much as the impression of a vast concentration camp.

We have just learned that Ron Henderson, founder of the excellent Washington card store Pulp, died on February 15, 2009. Ron was a remarkable person, full of life and humor, and we are grieved. He was the first retailer to agree to carry our cards, and we are enduringly grateful to him for the support and encouragement.

Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide victory over Herbert Hoover in November 1932 and his inauguration to the presidency in March 1933 both passed unremarked in Life’s cartoons, while commentary on the Great Depression itself remained at the same low level set in 1932. There is thus not much to choose from here, which is not to say the cartoons that were published are without interest. (Continue reading . . .)

In Act II, Scene 1, of Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago entertains Desdemona and Emilia with a teasing rant against the fair sex, in the course of which he asserts that “You are … / … / Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your beds.” Unfortunately the pun is lost on a modern audience, since housewife no longer has the secondary meaning of “hussy” it once did (the evidence of ABC’s popular Desperate Housewives notwithstanding). What Iago is alleging is that women are idle in their housekeeping and sluts in the bedroom. This sort of thing qualifies as fairly standard Elizabethan banter between the sexes. Desdemona, with her “O, fie upon thee, slanderer!”, only pretends to be offended, and Iago replies by improvising a couplet: “Nay, it is true, or else I am a Turk, / You rise to play, and go to bed to work.” (Continue reading . . .)

In joyous lockstep with the relentless march of modern technology, Archelaus has created its very own Facebook page. I admit it’s not all that exciting yet, but please have a look anyway. Even better, if you happen to belong to Facebook, you can show your support for Archelaus by becoming a fan. (Personally, I can’t imagine why you would, but people have been known to do stranger things.)

In 1931, Life published something like seventy cartoons on one aspect or another of the economic crisis. In 1932, that number plunged to around a dozen. Only part of this drop was due to the shift from weekly to monthly publication (the first monthly issue, in December 1931, had included no fewer than eight Depression cartoons). Instead the main reason must surely have been an editorial decision to downplay the unpleasant topic, in recognition of the fact that after two years the public was heartily sick of the Depression. (Continue reading . . .)