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Posts Tagged ‘history’

Boris Rose, King of the Bootleggers

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Sucker for buried treasure that I am, the story of Boris Rose, jazz bootlegger supreme caught my attention as I perused Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays [preview]

Around 1940, Boris began dubbing 78RPM records to 10-inch red vinyl disks with hand-written white labels.  He would sell these dubs of Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and other great early jazz musicians to anyone interested in buying them….

Over the years Boris captured thousands of hours of recordings that likely did not exist anywhere else — his was easily the largest private collection of its kind anywhere in the world.  Eventually Boris began recording every sort of broadcast imaginable — he even recorded the soundtracks of entire movies as they were broadcast over television.

What Rose became known for is the bootleg LPs of these recordings from old 78s and live jazz radio broadcasts.  He sold these records commercially, complete with liner notes and illustrated covers, under the names of invented “foreign” record labels like Alto and Radiex.  Despite being fairly prolific for a unauthorized distributor, the vast majority of his recordings have never been released.

Boris Rose died on the last day of the 20th century, leaving his collection to his daughter Elaine.  The recordings remain in storage, largely unheard by anyone other than Rose himself an presently unavailable anywhere else.  That’s thousands of hours of unheard sounds sitting in a storage shed in the Bronx, an archive that’s hard to fathom.

r a n d o m g o o g l i n g p r o d u c e d l i t t l e m o r e i n f o on Mr. Rose.

illustration by Brendan Burford

Tags: bootleg, boris rose, Bronx, fake foreign, history, jazz, LPs, Music, piracy, radio, red vinyl
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God is Not the Creator

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

Richard Alleyne in the Telegraph writes:

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

I don’t think Fundamentalist Christians, Nonfundamentalist Christians, or Non-Christians would care. Anyone who has made their mind up on that matter will not be changed by this historically important but practically superficial revelation if true. Already in the Bible is firm on not eating shrimp and sound advice on what to do if the master you sold your daughter to takes another wife. As the Bible is a large work with contradictions allowing followers to pick-and-choose the parts they like no new translation would change their beliefs.

Reminds me of a corny joke in the book House of Leaves:

One day, two monks were in the vaults of the monastery going through the old scrolls.

“You see, there are the originals,” said the first monk. “All the new scrolls were copied from these.”

“Can I see one?”

“Sure. This is one outlines the rules for monkdom–” All of a sudden, the monk’s face turns white and he falls to his knees.

“What? What does it say?”

“Celebrate. IT SAYS CELEBRATE!”

Tags: Atheism, Bible, Christianity, history, Language
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Manners are the Weapon

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Last week’s pop science debut of the remains of the early hominid species Ardipithecus ramidus was notable for a variety of reason’s, not the least of which was the secrecy and slow, careful approach of the scientists involved, so different from the half-baked, chuck out speculation for the slavering masses approach of so much of what crops up in my internet drain trap.  I particularly liked Carl Zimmer’s summary of the findings, with this paragraph catching my eye:

White and his colleagues  found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys.

Paleoanthropologists and their ilk can only work with what they dig up and so quite often charting prehistory can be a little too reliant on tracing the minutia of stones tools and other artifacts, reducing our evolution to a technological arms race that sorted out the killer apes with the best kill sticks and honey diggers.

But what fascinates me are the inferences into social structure and group relations which I regard as a type of technology in its own right, even more more important to discerning why humans have been so prosperous in a world they are seemingly physically unprepared to thrive in.  A fire can keep you warm but so can rules governing the cooperation of individuals and acceptable norms of contact and exchange.

Social structure should to be regarded as a technology with profound effects on evolutionary adaptation.  The way we relate to each other in a group is a construct and one that is passed on intact from generation to generation even as outside pressures prompt innovation in its design.  Much as the technique of flint-napping was passed down an refined–yielding meat and defense, fueling population growth and fostering group stability–prodding and bending the ties that bind any two or more humans into a coherent structure that underpins a culture determines the fate of each unit of humanity, both in competition against the elements and against other groups of humans.

In short, some societies work and some don’t.  Those poorly configured prototypes of how a band of humans should treat each other reap destruction and stumble off into the cliche of cliches, the dustbin of history.  Jared Diamond has a better rap about that than me.

The lesson to take from this is neither conservative nor progressive.  Yes, this indicates that our social structure is a vital thing that has brought us very far, protecting us from much uncertainty.  So don’t break it, right?

But still, where would we be without innovations to it?  In the forest with our highly specialized rituals and mores about picking fleas off each others’ backs.  Instead, we’re riding the exponential upstroke of unprecedented connectivity, allowing cultures to meet, mix, exchange and clash like never before.  I’m not telling you anything new here.  You saw the commercial for this back when they still called it the Information Superhighway.

And so, reading about the ancient teeth of a long-extinct evolutionary cousin has me in awe of what millions of years of figuring out who eats what and when and who sleeps with who has wrought.

It strikes me that this process has never been entirely peaceful or without uncertainty and often our manners and social rules have been born of far more bloodshed than the usually just annoying culture wars we Americans seem to fixate on over who eats what and who sleeps with whom.  While the random spots where these conflicts burst into violence and hateful breaches of civility make me recoil in disgust, so far the body count has nothing on, say, the Protestant Reformation or European contact with the inhabitants of the Americas.

What I’m getting at is that while relations between genders, ages, cultures, classes and competing perceptions of reality are artificial constructs, they’re also the code of a society’s operating system.  That code is rapidly forking and millions out there are debugging it everyday.  Some of these will be dead-ends.  (How many versions of Linux are we up to these days?)  But certain codes of tolerance, order and patience at the center of modernity have so far kept this exchange thriving.  This is the promise of our connected future and something to take pride in as a citizen of the world right now.  Be bold, but know what’s worth keeping.

Tags: ardipithecus, history, hominids, Jared Diamond, manners, paleoanthropology, prehistory, science, social networking, society, technology
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Terra Infirma: Republic of Mainz

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

If I were pressed to come up with a guiding principle for my curiosity about the ungainly beast commonly called ‘History’, it’d be that history has margins and a good amount of the interesting stuff is scribbled there, though hastily erased.  Hence, my interest in what could be called ‘ephemeral places,’ that is, geographic entities whose existence was brief, disputed or is often overlooked.

Here’s a softball: a German democratic state that existed for less than four months in the late 1700s.  The Republic of Mainz was created by a counterattack of the free French army against the Prussians and Austrians, driving out Mainz’s ruler and leading the way tothe first democratically-elected parliament in Germany.

Like many other statelets allied and/or established by revolutionary France, Mainz soon got trounced by the re-invading forces of the old order, finally being completely snuffed out in July 1793.

So it goes, but what piques my interest in this brief flash of a republic is what it must have been like to be breathing in those heady Jacobin fumes rolling in over the border in the wake of every big man of the Church-Monarch syndicate taking to their heels.  What a microculture!  Living in an entirely experimental way, figuring out how life works out of the suddenly evaporated old order, first within the borders of the Mainz Republic and then finally just withing the walls of the besieged stronghold of Mainz.

And all this, never mentioned–probably because it was the sort of thing that gave East German intellectuals a hard-on– in my high school tour of the French Revolution, best summed up as “THANK GOD THAT ENDED!!! THEY WERE RUNNING OUT OF PLACES TO PUT THE SEVERED HEADS!!!”

image via wikipedia

Tags: coat of arms, democracy, ephemeral places, french revolution, history, jacobin, Mainz, margins, revolution, states, terra infirma
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For Writers/Obsessives: Names and Weather

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

In the realm of fiction, the concept of ‘plausibility’ is a tricky little bastard.  Unless you’re writing about dimensionless plasma dragons beyond all mortal physics and continuity, it’s going to be a sticky wicket to lie just right so that your reader swallows it while still being swept away in the unique fantasy world you’ve crafted.

Even real life often comes off unlikely on the page.  Who among us young, shiftless, creative types has not tried to shoehorn into a plot some personally lived-through story that began with neutral spirits and come away muttering “Naw…. bullshit”?

As I said, a sticky wicket.  I’ll say it again if pressed.

Point being, it’s important to give some air of real life to your stories by recreating the milieu they take place in.  Character and setting greatly factor into this.  A couple of resources for this I came across tonight:

Weather History: The Weather Underground kindly provides historical weather information.  Punch in city, state (or zipcode or airport code) and the date you’re looking for and they’ve got what the weather was like clear back to the 1940s.  This is clutch for scenarios which integrate historical events.  Never again begin your lone gunman love story in Dealy Plaza with “It was a dark and stormy night…”

Popular Names Since 1879: Sure, everyone is named Jaden or Braden or UltraPeanut these days but naming an old guy ‘Tyler’ is going to fall flat and drag your story down with it.  Look up the top 200 from the approximate date of birth of your characters and pull from there.  It all feels less stalkery than combing through friends’ Facebook friends.

Both resources are fairly U.S.-centric but, well, tough luck, Nigel.  Post what you use that delivers more Basils and rainfall over Slough in the comments.

Tags: accuracy, history, names, Nigel, sticky wicket, tools, weather, writing
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