My newest assignment at the Archives is to catalog bound annual editions of The Fog Horn, the newspaper that was published by the now extinct Letterman General Hospital during its lifetime. So far I’m only up to 1944, and its going far slower than anticipated because I’m so intrigued by every minute detail in the damn things that i bury my nose in them and am lost for hours in the remotest part of our building. Regardless of those insufferable professional complaints, I found a real gem of historical fodder and proof that women haven’t come very far in the minds of men, in the grand scheme of things. I pulled this out of the Editorial section of the Saturday, May 30, 1942 edition of The Fog Horn:

Blonde Or Brunette

Some psychologists say blondes have a tendency to night-blindness and also that despite their carefree exteriors their suicide rate is higher than amongst brunettes. But don’t let her hair ever worry you. Look at her soul. That’s the source of real joy. Don’t be misled by a grinning super-charged Hollywood exterior. If her soul is at real peace and she is sure of herself–and of you, she won’t commit suicide.

Brunettes have to powder their nose more, ’tis said, and have by actual count 1/3 fewer hairs than blondes although their hair is stronger, hence will stand much more hair-pulling than blonde or red heads, without coming out in a hair-pulling out bout. The blonde has a harder time choosing clothes that won’t clash, hence the brunette may become more careless.

But finally they say blondes and brunettes are on a a par as far as temperament, and moods, character, and fidelity are concerned so you’re right back where you started. Hence, pick your wife for the color of her soul. That determines her actions and reactions; good and bad actions.

Shall I translate? Blondes aren’t necessarily more fun and you can yank on the brunette’s hair as hard as you want so go for the safe choice and pass up the starlet for the little philly you can lead around in the bedroom. Oh..but we must stress that it’s VERY important to pick a wife for other reasons such as the beautiful color of her personage; it’s what’s on the inside that’s important. I know, it’s laughable to throw that in as a caveat after all that’s been said (truly a nice cover). And let’s not forget this is psychologically determined–it’s science. One cannot argue with science.

Honestly: humans have evolved little since the 1940s.

I just bought and finished Howard Barker’s brief collection of poems titled “The Breath of the Crowd,” and I am utterly enrapt. Austere poetry such as Barker’s truly displays genius at its most fine-tuned; finesse and an impressive command of the english language emerge when one is succinct, as he is and as most (if not all) successful poetry is. He’s wondrously adept at capturing the beauteous deformities humanity is blessed with in the scale of a single page.

I recommend this work to anyone who feels mundane occurrences are achingly sublime. But don’t take my word for it, here’s a sample:

Prologue

They’d bolt the past into a drawing room / If they could

Smother the yelps of a triumphant reason / In the hems of dresses

And the clots of inspiration mop up / In the flannel of an actor’s shirt

So it behoves us

At moments of false celebration / At moments of imminent colonialism / And selective memory

To reach through

The cities of print / The forests of film / The drowning sheets of bands

Bursting the teeth of the star / Breaking the grin of the celebrity

And bawling over the applause / Which draws the pebbles down the beach / And draws them up again

Describe

Our strata of pains on pains

Our silt of panics

Obscure crucifixions and unpublished griefs

Europe’s deeps

If that doesn’t quite tickle your fancy, perhaps my favorite passage of the poetic ensemble will, one which conjures the same intellectual aura the final scenes in Kafka’s The Trial–the second to last chapter titled In the Cathedral in which the omniscient narrator wonders if K., the ambiguously persecuted lead character, could “represent the congregation all by himself?” At any rate, in the first full fledged poem of the collection humbly titled 1, Barker writes: 

The man without religion / Haunts the empty church

Dragging his fingers over the bench / And counting his heel on the tiles

He is imagining a state of being alone

What do you think silence is / Only the absence of sound?

Poetry can often times be a fussy mistress to both poet and reader alike, and as such a tempestuous bedfellow it attracts specific people for specific reasons, I suppose–reasons that undulate with circumstance and age. Which is to say that my recommendations are fruitless in many respects–fodder for the wind–because I just can’t circumvent fickle nature of attraction, but I’ve personally resigned myself to this poet’s embrace and I hope you find yourself warmed by his rhythmic verbiage as well.

And did I mention the book was only $4.00, purchased unused at City Lights Books?

No, it’s not the portrait the Dorian Grey. It’s our vicest president, Dick. Remember when mother said if you squinched up your face it’d freeze and stay that way? Well Dick’s mom didn’t bother. She had to tie a pork chop around Li’l Dickie’s neck to get the dog to play with him.

People are people. As foreign as our ancestors may seem to us at times, they suffered from the same idiosyncratic deficiencies that morally compromise us, the children of technocratic modernity, and leave us dialed into an oddly prescribed fox-trot; we walk the same streets, just different incarnations. In other words, no matter how far we feel we’ve progressed beyond our fathers’ and our fathers’ fathers’ impulses, we have not.

Nothing makes this more glaringly obvious to me than photography. Much of what I preserve at the archives are photographs, largely because they are the best way to interact with our past; nothing is more engaging than seeing a person from another time and identifying characteristics that remind you of yourself, possibly, or maybe someone else that you know. Photographic methodology has changed, its been concomitantly advanced and simplified, and the power to document the present is at the fingertips of every Tom, Dick and Harry, yet technological ease does not an artist make. There has certainly been something lost with the prevalence of digital formats: an attention to detail. When photographic materials were still rare and expensive, photographers chose and framed their subjects carefully, and when the development process was still lengthy and scrupulously indebted to a skillful dedication to ones art-form, photography remained just that–an art. Now my nine year old cousin has a digital camera, and if you align the settings to “idiot proof,” she is fully capable of taking pictures that rival my own.

What sent me on this tangential musing is a combination of two elements in the history of photography: a photographic process that undeniably declares photography an endangered art-form, and a photographic man who pioneered the beauty of immediacy by marketing human frailty.

Artistic inspiration generally emerges organically from an artist, but the artistic process should be more agonizing and time intensive than fits of creative brainstorming; photogravure is the epitome of such a sentiment. Photogravure is an intaglio printmaking process that was initially developed in the 1830s by Henry Fox Talbot and Nicephore Niepce, and predated daguerreotypes, with which people are generally more familiar. Although this method produces prints with extraordinary tonal depth, the steps required for its production are as tedious as they are laborious:

• Step One: a continuous tone film positive is made form the original photographic negative.
• Step Two:  a sheet of pigmented gelatin tissue (which is now solely manufactured by one company–the Autotype Company) is sensitized by immersion into a solution of potassium dichromate and dried against a plexiglas sheet.
• Step Three: the film positive is exposed to the sensitized gravure tissue, placed on top of the pigmented gelatin tissue, and the combination is then exposed to UV light. A separate exposure is applied to a hard-dot mezzotint screen; the UV light passes through the positive and the screen and hardens the gelatin in proportion to the degree of light to which its exposed.
• Step Four: the exposed tissue is adhered to a copper plate under a layer of cool water
• Step Five: a hot water bath removes the paper backing and washes away unexposed gelatin; the layer that remains forms a contoured resist on the copper plate, i.e. a picture emerges.
• Step Six: the resulting plate is etched in a series of ferric chloride baths in steps which creates a gravure plate with tiny wells of varying depth to hold ink.
• Step 7: a print is created.

The scarcity of supplies and the sheer time commitment involved in the photogravure process is why there are only a few dozen practitioners in the entire world today: that’s right–a few DOZEN, the entire WORLD.

Flying Lessons

And even while I deign to lament the loss of an attention to prolonged process as a means to purify art and arts intent, I am also quite beholden to the temporal beauty of the instantaneous moment that propelled Weegee to the epicenter of popular culture on the coattails of the dehumanized matter he offered to the world of journalism, then the art world, and then, most appropriately, the ultimate realm of the unreal–cinema. In many ways, Weegee was the liaison between the barbarous beauty of the streets and the barbarity of the upper crust; he showed the denizens of the early twentieth-century how the proverbial Gotham could exist in cold urban exteriors as well as the frothiest of glamorous insiders and the interiors they were inside. He cut his photographic teeth at a time when organized crime ran rampant, so crime was what he documented. Yet even given the rawness of his subject, his ability to capture people best while at their worst was remarkable in that even while chronicling the syndicates of evil or perversion, he still retained a certain frail intimacy within the lens that keeps the most gruesome, repulsed tinges in the viewer at bay and allows us to empathize, sympathize, or what-have-you –connect–with the (often times) degenerate images that are proffered before us. Many of his subjects were witnesses to crimes and tragedies–crowds amassed behind police barricades stricken with agonizing amuse as they watched buildings burn and bodies, maimed and lifeless, loaded into antiquated coroners station-wagons, mothers besides themselves with grief witnessing the same events, the list could go on. The point is, he was there to capture these images–spontaneous images that found a market; film noir was quick to adapt his motifs to the silver screen and he was an integral part from the ground floor, up. By forgoing stages crafted by powder puffs and strategic lighting, he heightened the authenticity of his photographs and forged a medium that would influence the production of art for decades to come.

Weegee: Crime

1942: Tenement Fire

Later in his career he had the pleasure of photographing high society in their element, such as opening night at the Opera; here is where beauty is inverted and Weegee’s genius truly shines. He used infrared film that allowed to take candid photos of the rich and famous while in attendance at various and sundry events, decked out in their finest furs and gems, and in doing so exposed them for the hideous vessels they were, composed of little more than masterfully disguised imperfections: veins, whiskers, and other unsightly human characteristics were exposed. Here he acted as a type of artistic archeaologist, unearthing the ugliness of American royalty, while simultaneously exalting the beauty of the unincorporated and disenfranchised–those who held their grief close and endured with dignity and relative grace, with little shelter from their misery and the prying eyes that were often the very source of their burdens. 

Mrs. George Washington Cavanagh

Perhaps his greatest legacy is his ability to expose the fact that the entirety of the world we’ve created is largely pedantic farce–one in which the wolves don sheep’s clothing and the sheep are left shivering in dimly lit alleys taking comfort in the grief of the less fortunate. Juxtaposed against one another, photogravure and Weegee’s off-the-cuff creations are equally artistic, if not equally accessible; we all garner the possibility of finding a Weegee amongst ourselves, but very few will have the opportunity allow the photogravuretuer within us.

But people are people. Our reactions continue to revolve in repetitive cycles because human nature has only deviated so much since its inception. I say this because the rich still believe in the insulating capabilities of their finery, and the poor are still looking for kicks where ever they can get them. I say this because what is considered beautiful very rarely is, and what most take for granted because of its weathered carcass is often radiantly divine. We still love, we still hate, we still grieve, we still railroad our intentions with pragmatic placation, we still find hope and laughter in pedantic brutality and simplistic idiocy. We still find comfort in one another, despite our complete inability stave off the inevitable emotional rape and plunder that accompanies all human interaction. Because, in the end, to do anything short of the aforementioned would be less than human and people are, if nothing else, people.

People are People

Just launched a new site for all of my music related posts: vagabondmusic.wordpress.com; hope the minimal readers I have at present will follow me there. To run a quick synopsis of the changes that have been made, all creative writing is now at textualkenosis.wordpress.com, music at the aforementioned site, and here is a list of what you can expect from noirnicole:

• At the Archives: a log of ephemera I encounter at work.
• Metropolis Town: a voyeuristic jaunt through quasi-fictionalized renditions of the ridiculous human tales I accrue on a daily basis; in general, my thoughts on society and the socials.
• Headlines and Footnotes: a collection of current events and my opinionated interpretation.
• The Arts, the Artful, and the Artless: a discussion of literature, art, film, photography and all other associated cultural output. 

Building 35 Postcard, 1914 (Cat. # 12426; Acc. # 2204)

I recently cataloged a black and white photographic postcard of Building 35 on the Presidio, which was originally built as cavalry barracks in 1912. Seeing a building that is centered on the main post of the Presidio and completely surrounded by other military buildings serving in various capacities, standing on its own, with nothing but dirt lots on all sides, is impressive on its own, but the pithiest facets of this item’s provenance pertains to its sender and the message she inscribed. Sent to Gloucester, Massachusetts by a woman named Alda whose husband (presumably), Ned, lived in Building 35. The message on the back is as follows:

April 30th, 1914

Dear Elizabeth,

It is truly lonesome with all the men gone to the Border. I haven’t decided yet whether I should break into housekeeping, but I think I will until they come back from the Border. Lots of love to Mother and Father.

Alda

The deployment she refers to was probably in response to an edict in which President Wilson ordered the seizure of Vera Cruz, Mexico’s customhouse and guns for accepting ammunitions from an incoming German ship, and the US Army’s Fifth Infantry Brigade commanded by Brigadeer General Frederick Funston was sent to the region to oversee the resignation of President Huerta and the establishment of the Carranza government, all of which occurred during the month of April, 1914.

The little history-geek in me practically devours ephemera like this with fascination; an expansive spectrum of San Francisco and national history in one tiny postcard, in a mere few lines. The Presidio and all who were stationed here were such an integral part of the expansion and protection of our borders–something which is hard to fathom given almost a century of relative calm these California shores and our landlocked borders. Brig. Gen. Funston’s name is emblazoned on street signage all over San Francisco in memorial of his “heroic” actions when the city partially burned to the ground after the 1906 Earthquake (I use heroism loosely here: he protected thousands of civilians in tent cities on military grounds, but he was also the genius responsible for stringing TNT through buildings and blowing them to smitherines in order to rob the fire of its fodder but in reality only spread the fires that much further). Woodrow Wilson’s orders were proactive and pragmatic (as pragmatic as foreign relations that involve a bordering country’s armament can be), an indication of what would come throughout and after WWI.

I spend most of my time at the Park Archives and Records Center in the Presidio located at 667 McDowell Ave, San Francisco, Ca 94129, where I’m an Archives Technician. I’m responsible for various and sundry tasks that are far too banal to describe in detail, but lately I’ve had the pleasure of cataloging accessioned items in preparation for public research. By and large I deal with military history pertaining to the Presidio of San Francisco, most of which (so far) has dealt with the protracted bickering with Mexico and our time fighting over the Phlippines at the turn of the twentieth-century; associated ephemera includes a plethora of photographs sent in by relatives of the soldiers who kept them safe for so long. I also come across ephemera associated with a San Francisco that is exists solely within the memories entombed within an aging population that is either physically or mentally beyond our reach.

While I was cataloging these items I had a disheartening ephiphany: these items are fucking cool, and no one is going to see them because no one ever comes in here. And then I had another epiphany: if we don’t have the funding to digitize our collections, I’m going to write about them and, at the very least, disseminate a fraction of the information we have available here to a wider audience; and thus the idea for this new segement, “At the Archives,” was born.

Before we get started, I want this to be known: if you see anything that piques your interest and you want to know more about it, the Archives is open for public reference Monday 1-4pm and Thursday 10am-1pm, or by appointment. For questions or appointments call and/or email Amanda Williford at (415) 561-2808 and Amanda_Williford@nps.gov; more often than not, what will be showcased on this blog is only the tip of the iceberg.

Nixon Visit to Potential GGNRA Site Photographs, 1972 (Cat. # GOGA 12427, Acc. # GOGA-2187)

I came across three photos of then Pesident Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, along with an entourage that included Laurence Rockefeller and astronaut John Glenn, visiting potential Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) sites that was orchestrated in an effort to encourage legislative approval for the park, a process that was delayed at the time due to an inability to procure a Senate hearing for the bill which proposed such an establishment. Tricky Dick and his possee toured the San Francisco Bay on a boat which launched from a newly reconstructed pier at Fort Point. The photos were donated by Amy Meyer who, as a key figure in the People for a Golden Gate National Recreation Area (PFGGNRA), is the matriarch of the park, in many ways; suffice to say, anyone who enjoys a Sunday meandering around the Presidio, Fort Mason, or the Marin Headlands should send a gracious vibe Amy’s way. At any rate, when she donated the photos she also identified everyone in them, which include representatives from the Sierra Club, California Tomorrow, SPUR, and the Greenbelt Alliance. The person who intrigued me the most, however, was Bob Lurie, who was only identified by a $ beside his name. Upon running a quick google search I discovered him to be a San Francisco Real Estate developer who owned the Giants at one time and either owns, owned, or built most of the properties on Montgomery Street, including the property the famous Trans-America Building is built on; money makes the world go round, and gets you a spot on Nixons entourage.

Tom Waits: “Bottom of the World”

Fleet Foxes

: “Mykonos”

Zsammy: “Your Chest Is Not Moving”

She Keeps Bees: “Stutter”

Wolf Parade: “Shine A Light”

Carlos Knight (aka Richie Cunning): “Champion of My Heart”