Reading about Frank Lloyd Wright is fun because articles about the man himself bang on about how he was a revolutionary genius and the quintessence of American architecture, but when you read up on individual projects, you keep running into anecdotes about how the contractor secretly modified the plans from Wright’s original designs in order to improve stability and/or the near-constant restoration efforts that have been required to prevent the thing from collapsing under its own weight – it’s like seeing a cautionary parable play out in tiny, tiny increments.
FLW was also notoriously an asshole to basically everyone he worked with, so those anecdotes are ABUNDANT. Not one solitary person hesitates for a second to spill the tea on Wright, and it’s fantastic.
I need to look into this. We briefly covered him in Art History but it was just like “oh he was a screaming genius. Next”
Yeah, no – it turns out that a lot of his best known works are self-indulgent bullshit that just flagrantly ignores the basic principles of structural engineering and are only still standing because he had the good fortune of working with builders who took one look at the blueprints and were like: “Yeah, this isn’t going to work – let’s just fix it without telling him.”
My grandmother was a leading expert on Frank Lloyd Wright and I think would largely agree with this summary. My favorite of her stories was that Wright was 5′7″ and thus didn’t see the point of making a ceilings and doorjams higher than six feet when it looked better that low. He was an artistic genius but his houses are unlivable for anyone over 6′ or so.
My favourite height-related allegation – which I see your source partly corroborates – is that Wright would get salty about people over six feet tall being allowed to walk around in his buildings because he felt it threw off the sense of scale. I’m not sure he ever really grasped that buildings are things people live in.
“St Francis receives the stigmata” is a great motif because it’s just
Spaceship Jesus coming in to fuck up his hands and feet with laser
beams. Classic. Art.
Did you guys know they make straight-up sheets of non-triangle-cut canned crescent roll dough now? I figured everyone knew but I told my mum and it BLEW HER MIND so I figured I should probably tell the internet, just in case.
I can’t hold it in any more WHY WHY IS THE DOUGH IN A CAN AMERICA THE LAND OF THE CANS WHY WHAT IS THIS CANS ARE FOR THINGS THAT YOU LEAVE AT THE BACK OF THE CUPBOARD FOR 6 YEARS AND THEN THROW OUT WHEN YOU MOVE OR PIE FILLING I’LL GIVE YOU THE PIE FILLING BUT DOUGH? MEAT? YES THEY PUT MEAT IN CANS TOO! HEATHENS!
Canning has a long tradition in America, going back to the colonization of the east coast and later of the west, where isolated farmhouses might go weeks without access to a dry goods store and had no access at all to fresh food in the winter (barring winter hunting, which could not get you fruits and veg). Canning was a common practice to make sure you had some kind of plant food to survive the winter months.
During the early 20th century, when industrialized food preservation and production was picking up (especially because long-term preservation was necessary for feeding troops in combat) canned food became commonplace, including in poor urban areas where refrigeration wasn’t available. Canned meat, because of mass production, might be more available and less costly than fresh meat, and would certainly last longer. (It’s now considered subpar to easily available fresh meat, but many people still have a can in their pantry or two, just in case, and canned tuna is a quite popular way to keep fresh cooked fish around for snacking without dealing with the smell). For households with two working parents or with only one parent, canned food was a convenient way to stock the larder for the week and still be able to provide your family with a decent meal. During the war, women who worked during the day and had a husband off in combat (or had a husband who had died in combat) still had to come home and feed their families, but without the eight hours a day they normally had to shop, prepare, and cook a meal (and do the laundry, and clean the home, and the million other unpaid labor activities that are always overlooked in homemakers and took a lot longer before industrialization).
After WWII, canned food was a major sub-industry because of all this, but with improved shipping speeds and preservation methods, it was also on the decline as an in-demand product; we started getting seasonal fruit and veg year-round which put the demand for canned food, sold next to said fresh food, on the decline. Marketing offices for canned food producers turned to aggressively marketing quick-cook recipes as a method of selling more product – if you can empty a can of condensed cream-of-mushroom soup into a dish instead of chopping and sauteeing fresh mushrooms and adding a cream-soup base, you’d save at least forty to fifty minutes of your time, you wouldn’t have to worry about buying mushrooms and cream (neither of which keep long, even in refrigeration) and you’d get a meal that was still pretty tasty. Particularly for boomers, who were raised on this method of cooking, it’s a totally normal flavor in prepared food. Keeping a can of cream-of-mushroom soup in the pantry was standard, and we used them in our house with regularity. The only reason I don’t keep one in my own pantry is that I have a dry soup mix that just requires adding mushrooms, and I have pre-chopped mushrooms available to me within two blocks of my apartment, plus the time, money, and able-bodiedness to procure them. You can get five or six cans of cream of mushroom soup for the cost of a pint of cream and a container of mushrooms, and you don’t have to walk from the veg aisle on one side of the store to the dairy aisle, usually on the opposite side.
Also in the 1950s, canned food was a common stockpile item against nuclear winter. Cold-war thinking bred two generations, the Boomers and the older GenXers, who wanted lots of food on hand in case we ended up nuked by Russia. Preparation for the Cold War honestly is the reason that people freak out about natural disasters and end up buying tons of fresh food, because those two generations were indoctrinated into the idea that any disaster means lack of available food.
And canned food in the pantry means if you get home at the end of the day and you’re exhausted, you don’t have to drive to a supermarket (remember that in the US there are very few corner groceries outside of major urban areas anymore, and many urban areas contain “food deserts” with no groceries at all). You can open a can, pour it into a pot, maybe dress it up a little, and have a decent hot meal. Making baked beans from dried beans, if you don’t have a pressure cooker, takes hours even if you do have a slow cooker; making baked beans from a can takes either 30 minutes (if you have plain canned beans; this also requires tomato sauce or ketchup or bbq sauce, plus brown sugar or molasses) or 10 minutes (if you have canned pork and beans, which might enjoy some added mustard and bbq sauce but don’t require them). And it’s a reasonably nutritious, filling meal.
Canned bread dough has to be refrigerated. It’s a sub-luxury food – it’s cheap and convenient but still needs to be bought relatively fresh and requires some, but not much, labor to prepare. It’s a nice dressing on the table if you have extra energy, or a fun meal to make with your family that doesn’t involve hours in the kitchen. Rolling little sausages up in Pilsbury dough takes maybe half an hour, but it doesn’t take the hour and a half to two hours it would if you had to make the dough from scratch. And in our culture where “quick cook” is aggressively marketed to sell convenience foods, there’s some competition to be had in terms of who can come up with the most imaginative use of this food – what’s the best thing to stuff into the bread, how do you cope best with the triangular shape, how delicious can you make this essentially convenience food.
So, in short (too late) canned food in this country arises from need and continues to cater to it, influenced by a combination of Madison Avenue, the military-industrial complex, and the shrinking quality of life for the middle and working class.
To open a crescent roll can you hold it in two hands and twist them in opposite directions. It makes a popping sound and it’s super satisfying. In 10 minutes you can have enough croissants for a few people to snack on or for one person to gorge on, and they literally taste like the concept of softness. And they’re fucking delicious with nutella. There is nothing bad or questionable about this precious perfect food product. (Not to mention that my single mother used these as a great activity for us both to do with limited time and money, tying in to what copperbadge said.)
canned food is also really important within the history of post-depression america. we basically go from the turn of the century to world war one (rations) to the jazz age (incredible inequality) to the depression (you wish things were as good as they were when we had rations) to world war two (rations two: electric boogaloo) so like, from about 1918-1950, you see consistent major upheavals in the way we procure our food and thus the way we cook. we kind of go from “anything you can get on the table” for about fifty years to “sudden and overwhelming abundance exacerbated by the presence of new technologies like flash freezing, freeze drying, advanced dehydrating, and new preservatives”
and you also see major upheavals in how labor works and what labor is by the time we get to having a stable, twentieth century food supply, so the result is
you have basically fifty years worth of americans that have lived through and been formed by serious food insecurity, major shifts in labor and class, major shifts in what an occupied and properly tended to domestic sphere consists of, and cold war disaster preparedness. all of this hits a culture that draws its ethical and spiritual root from the puritans (and i cannot overstate the importance of the puritans and protestant christianity in shaping the american diet and what the american meal is– much less american dieting culture) and new and exciting food technologies, and the shit hits the fan and
things get buck wild
there’s a really common statement made about julia child in that she taught america how to cook again, and there’s something to that that is very very true. it’s arguable that a love of food as an artful and beautiful tradition didn’t exist in america meaningfully until julia child, and that’s because she imported it from france. but yeah, arguably, america stopped cooking for fifty years and then by the time we had the resources to cook again, things had changed so much that many many americans didn’t have the time or the money to do it, and tastes had changed so much that we couldn’t do it as we had done before because no one liked it anymore.
i’ve reblogged this before but i’m gonna do it again because it’s so interesting, especially considering family history and recipes.
some great hold overs from the poor south 1950s:
dirty rice – put rice, a can of french onion soup, a can of beef consomme, half a stick of butter, and canned mushrooms in a baking dish and bake it. that’s it, you’re done, dig in. fucking delicious and my dad grew up on this. same concept as green bean casserole (or literally any casserole ever) like just dump canned soup and other canned ingredients in with butter and bake it until delicious. it’s got lots of sodium but this is Florida/Georgia it’s hot as fuck you’re gonna be sweating anyway you need it.
pea salad – drained canned sweet peas tossed in a dressing made of mayonnaise, ranch, vinegar, and garlic powder. peas and all the makings are cheap, it’s a cold “wet salad” from the same family of thought as potato salad or coleslaw, goes well with most meat or barbecue, and convinces your kids to eat green stuff on the cheap. Fancier version: buy the sweet peas with pearl onions and mushrooms mixed in. Cheap and also delicious the world can fight me on this one. good alternative to coleslaw if someone’s got something against shredded cabbage and carrot in a perfect delicious tangy sweet dressing handed down from the gods (i’ll throw down about some coleslaw too oops)
and when you’re feeling really wild and like splurging you get the wonder of the tater sandwich– whole wheat bread with mayo or butter, and your choice of fried potatoes on it. My dad’s mom used to slice potatoes into rounds and fry them in a skillet on the stove top; my mum is a Scot who also had the Scot version of a tater sandwich (makes sense, lots of poor scots ended up in the SE where my dad’s family is from, lots of culinary crossover) and so makes homemade thick cut chips (call them fries at your peril). I’m not down with the tater sandwich, I’m a potato purist who just wants to eat my weight in potatoes and nought else, but I respect my elders and there will be no bad mouthing a family tradition in this house.
all the recipes from that side of the family, be they canned soup based or otherwise, are cheap, filling, and delicious. It’s not always the healthiest food by any stretch, but you’re not hungry, it tastes good, and it’s actually got a fare amount of veggies– probably because my dad’s family grew their own vegetables in a huge family garden beside their house. It was good peaty soil right next to a swamp and my Pa could have grown a new car from a rubber tire if he so chose, he was such a good farmer. My dad and his three sisters used to end up working in the garden every day after school. It was the only way they could have gotten fresh produce otherwise, they had so little money. Considering then that a lot of families didn’t have that and probably saw even less fresh produce in their kitchen than my dad’s family did…
legit, i have so much respect for people like my granny and pa who turned out such good tasting stuff from nothing but instant rice and condensed soup.
“Authors can’t use it in fantasy fiction, eh? We’ll see about that…”
–Terry Pratchett, probably
Try to implement anything but a conservative’s sixth grade education level of medieval or Victorian times and you will butt into this. all. the. time.
There was a literaly fad in the 1890′s for nipple rings for all genders(and NO, it was NOT under the mistaken belief that it would help breastfeeding–there’s LOTS of doctors’ writing at the time telling people to STOP and that they thought it would ruin the breast’s ability to breastfeed well, etc). It was straight up because the Victorians were freaks, okay Imagine trying to make a Victorian character with nipple rings. IMAGINE THE ACCUSATIONS OF GROSS HISTORICAL INACCURACY
people just really, REALLY have entrenched ideas of what people in the past were like
tell them the vikings were clean, had a complex democratic legal system, respected women, had freeform rap battles, and had child support payments? theyd call you a liar
tell them that chopsticks became popular in china during the bronze age because street food vendors were all the rage and they wanted to have disposable eating utensils? theyll say youre making that up
tell them native americans had a trade network stretching from canada to peru and built sacred mounds bigger then the pyramids of giza? you are some SJW twisting facts
ancient egypt had circular saws, debt cards, and eye surgery? are you high?
our misconception of medieval peasants being illiterate and living in poverty in one room mud huts being their own creation as part of a century long tax aversion scam? you stole that from the game of thrones reject bin
iron age india had stone telescopes, air conditioning, and the number 0 along with all ‘arabic’ numbers including algebra and calculus? i understand some of those words.
romans had accurate maps detailing vacation travel times along with a star rating for hotels along the way, fast food restaurants, swiss army knives, black soldiers in brittany, traded with china, and that soldiers wrote thank-you notes when their parents sent them underwear in the mail? but they thought the earth was flat!
ancient bronze age mesopotamia had pedantic complaints sent to merchants about crappy goods, comedic performances, and transgender/nobinary representation? what are you smoking?
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
I dont know too much about Dalmatians or what they were bred for so the other day i was talking to the security guard on campus about em and decided to google why they’re so aggressive and hard to handle and apparently its because they were bread as coach dogs, which means that they were trained to run alongside a coach or carriage and fucking attack anything that wasn’t their carriage. Like they were bonded to the horses used to pull the coach and to their handlers and other than that they would just jump anyone who came near em. If you had coach dogs you actually had to have someone who rode ahead and warned anyone coming toward you that you had coach dogs so they could move out of the way and not get attacked. So thats a mystery solved for me.
That’s fuckin wild I had no idea
*me, a Regency-era noble, displaying my wealth and status by releasing a large pack of dalmatians onto the street* fuck it up, boys
This doesn’t show exactly what the caption suggests it shows.
In this scene, the lower pilot is dying. He had been captured, managed to escape, and stole a German plane to fly back. The upper pilot–his best friend and rival for the love of Clara Bow*–shot him down, believing he was the enemy. This is him kissing his friend goodbye.
“But that’s still slashy!” you can say. Yep, it is. “You can read this as homoerotic!” Yes, you can. “Why are you denying this? Is it because you think being gay or bi is shameful?” A thousand times no. I am pointing this out because I think this is an important piece of evidence about what homophobia has done to our society and to male expressions of emotion.
In 1927, the obvious reading of this scene, for audiences, was not that this was a romantic kiss. Audiences primarily understood this as an expression of friendship and love, because of course it was perfectly natural for non-romantically involved men to embrace or even kiss, particularly at highly emotional moments. Of course a dying man would want to be held during his last breaths. Of course a guilt- and grief-stricken man would want to kiss his friend goodbye.
However, not very long after this, the commercialization and commodification of homophobia became a powerful force. The market (including Hollywood) began drawing lines and graphs and boxes, declaring which emotions, expressions, habits, and even colors “belonged” to men and to women. This kind of touch, which would not necessarily have been sexualized during many eras or in many cultures, became forbidden to men in the US, Britain and Canada (and many other places, too) within the decade–and is still lost to them today. This scene–a far more honest expression of grief and affection than anything we’re used to seeing in today’s action films–became gay.
Now, if you strongly wish to write “Wings” slash, you can still do so–and not entirely by putting on your goggles! University culture of the 1900s-1920s definitely allowed for a far wider range of sexual behavior than frats do now, etc. I don’t want to police what anybody can and does find in “Wings.” But I think we should acknowledge what we lost when capitalism decided that, for men, kisses could only be sexual.
*You may recognize Clara Bow from that goddamned photo that keeps making the rounds of the internet captioned, “A sex ed class in the 1920s!” so everyone can hoot with derision at the shocked girls in their desks. The photo is actually a still from a movie, and the star, Ms. Bow, is front and center.
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