Ramblings and webcomics from LeEMS
There are plenty of thematically appropriate and dramatic representations of Passover in the movies. We will be taking a slightly sleepier and round about approach with Phenomena (1985) because sometimes we just need a comforting and familiar horror movie. What? Didn’t know that a European horror movie set in a girls school had anything to do with Passover? It’s easy to miss.
We may also track down “A Rugrats Passover” (1995). I am a sucker for cartoon holiday specials.
I might be running out of room in the modest space I have allotted myself for my vintage recipe pamphlets. I find it fascinating how the culmination of industrialization, new kitchen appliances, changing class structure, war, depression, and post war boom meant that EVERYONE – including electric companies, food suppliers, government agencies, and more – wanted to teach us how to cook at the end of the 19th century through and past the 1960s. Well, online collections of recipe pamphlets don’t take up space. Here are some:
My work sends me looking for all kinds of things that I would never, if entirely directing my own research, be compelled to search and learn. I am grateful for this. This is how I learned about George Cove and his solar electric generator…a little known 1909 precursor to solar panels. The Resilience article “How to Build a Low-Tech Solar Panel?” goes into detail on Cove’s work.
With the picture caption of the photograph from the Resilience article, I was able to find two articles about Cove’s work at the time:
I don’t know about you, but my professional life has been filled with discussions on AI generated text and art. The release of and growing proliferation of AI generated and assisted work has people asking many questions about originality, copyright, ethics, plagiarism, and more. I am discussing none of that here.
Instead, I decided to play with one of the AI art generators – an artificial intelligence program trained to create artwork based on a text prompt by synthesizing or learning from a collection of ‘training material’ gathered from various sources. Taking inspiration from one of my most popular posts to date, I wondered if Dall-E could give me a rendition of Spirited Horses that would’ve been compelling in similarity to Henri LeRoy’s had it been a contemporary of that work.
That most popular post is “Chromolithography and the Mystery of Henri and Anita LeRoy,” wherein I attempted to figure out the true authorship of a picture that I inherited from my grandmother, finding out all about chromolithography along the way. If you need a reminder, the first picture in the following gallery is what is often called ‘Spirited Horses’ with the signature of LeRoy. From what I was able to find out, the following two may have been issued as some kind of collect-all-three deal. The final picture is pretty darn similar in my opinion, issued by another chromolithographic company, Prang Co.
Well, I tried a couple prompts with Dall-E. The first try: “spirited horses in the style of a Victorian chromolithography,” said to me that the AI didn’t really know what I meant by chromolithographic style. Chromolithography was more a technique, but as a technique rooted very firmly to one main time period, I think they did have a look about them. A look that these four results did not capture.
I picked the last one, the one I thought most like my ‘Spirited horses’ and had the AI generate a few variations. The variations went to weird places.
For my next prompt I kept with the chromolithography word and tried: “chromolithography of horses running from a storm.” A couple of the examples here reminded me of the Prang, Co. image.
So I tried variations on the last one again.
Overall the experiment was interesting. I can see that the text prompt I give is of supreme importance. So, I tried ‘painting of two horses, one black and one white, with the black horse in the foreground, running from lightning.’ The results were different than the two previous tests but not any more ground breakingly similar to the chromolithographic prints I had studied previously.
Was I trying to get something that looked like an existing picture? Maybe. I’m not sure really. Knowing that the AI is trained on existing images from other artists has led many to worry that the images that result are copies, infringing on other artists rights. Of course each art AI I have played with is obviously trained on different images. If Henri LeRoy’s original Spirited Horses was in the training set, would I have gotten a more similar result from the AI? My playing around isn’t really meant to answer those questions. There are researchers trying to do this exactly: get a generated image that obviously infringes on one of its training images.
A few years ago I was inspired to overhaul my closet. I wanted to alter things that, with a little change, could be made more wearable. I wanted to weed out things that stood in the way of me finding the pieces I like to wear. And, I wanted to make sure I had a ready supply of outfits that made me feel powerful, playful, and attractive. I wanted my daily attire to delight me, to become a special part of my day instead of simply a necessary one.
And then I was introduced to Disneybounding by the various YouTubers I was watching. Disneybounding, to my understanding, is creating an outfit that evokes your favorite Disney character without overstepping Disney’s regulations on adult costumes, or even wearing something that looks like a costume. Relatedly, historybounding involves dressing to evoke a fashion period from the past, either by dressing in vintage or reproduction styles or by creating an outfit that resembles them.
The best part of everyday cosplay is that it includes completely normal everyday clothing. I just needed to obtain some key items for my wardrobe to make sure I had pieces to put together an outfit I thought evoked the character I had in mind. For instance, I already had a red and green striped shirt so all I felt I really need to evoke Freddy Kruger were some brown gloves. I obtained some snazzy black and white wingtip-esque t-strap shoes as the final pieces for a Joker outfit. Otherwise, creating the outfits just challenged me to think about the pieces in my closet a little differently – like I was pulling markers from a box to color in a character.
I have been both searching for, and working on, the perfect honey cake recipe for some time now. I love honey, especially the flavor varietals produced by honey from certain plants and locations. But I don’t love how heavy honey cakes can be, thus the search. So far, I have come up with a pretty good recipe for small cakes:
INGREDIENTS
360 for 30 minutes if in muffin molds
Originally had a 1/2 c of vegetable oil in with a 1/2 c of apple sauce, but the last time I made them I used a whole cup of apple sauce and forgot the oil – they came out wonderful. And by wonderful I mean, they were light and springy, admittedly a little sticky to the touch on the outside, but not heavy like many honey cakes can be.
I also gave this recipe a try recently:
I also gave the Spiced Honey Cake recipe from a 1938 “Season to Taste” baking pamphlet. It too was not overly heavy, but it didn’t taste as strongly of honey. The lack of heaviness and honey flavor were both probably due to only 1/2 cup of honey.
I haven’t gotten a lot of art up on the site this year and I am late in celebrating the birthday of my dear blog. Happy 15 years, Bean! And, Happy New Year to y’all. Thanks for sticking around. Here’s the doodlin I got out this year:
It’s been a while since I worked up an Every Month is ____ History Month post. Truth is, I got rather stalled on Pearl Bailey. The more information I found on her, the more I became completely fascinated, and nothing I found was quite enough. Unlike many other personalities that no-one I know seems to remember, Pearl Bailey wrote quite a bit about her life. I can’t tell you how excited I was to find out she had penned her own memoirs and social commentary. Suddenly, only her own words would do. I acquired a few of her books and, unfortunately, they got added to my to-read shelves. And, that is where the research post ended, until now.
No, I haven’t finished reading her biography (the one I picked up). I have read through Hurry Up America and Spit (1976), and I am currently picking through Pearl’s Kitchen (1973). The song on our Christmas mix, ‘Five Pound Box of Money’ by Pearl Bailey is just too good not to share now, and since I have got enough information for a basic biographical sketch, I figured why keep waiting. I am now a confirmed Pearl Bailey fan. I’m not going to have any trouble revisiting this great lady in another post once I have read about her story in her own words.
Pearl Baily was born in 1918 in Newport News, Virginia to Reverend Joseph James and Ella Mae Ricks Bailey (Pearl Bailey, 2022). Her brother, Bill Bailey was well known on the vaudeville stage. In a later article, Bailey recounted how she stumbled accidentally into show business by way of what sounded like a sibling spat. She had been sent to the theater to fetch her brother, who was rehearsing his dance act. He brushed her off and sent her home, so she returned, entered, and won the amateur contest that night. She was just fifteen (Pearl Bailey is serious about ambition to teach, 1956). After some time on vaudeville stages and touring the country with the USO during WWII, she made her Broadway debut in St. Louis Woman in 1946 (Pearl Bailey, 2022) to excited and complimentary reviews (Pearl Bailey’s easy style clicks on Broadway, 1946).
“The way I sing is the way I live,” Miss Bailey says…”What I do is like telling a story to music, it’s got to be something that brings a chuckle. The audience enjoys it because it tells of things they know.”
– Pearl Bailey (Pearl Bailey’s easy style clicks on Broadway, 1946)
Early on, she would describe herself as a writer when speaking with reporters and critics. Throughout a very successful career entertaining on stage, through which she was often featured in newspapers, she would carefully craft and plan her shows based on her projections of what the audience would be (Pearl Bailey’s next role, 1956). By 1956 she declared a desire to follow her long time dream of becoming a teacher, taking classes at UCLA towards that ambition (Pearl Bailey is serious about ambition to teach, 1956). She would later earn a degree in theology from Georgetown University, but before this she published several books (Pearl Bailey, 2022):
Somewhat satisfyingly, her achievements and greatness were awarded many times over during her lifetime. She was appointed special ambassador to the United Nations by President Gerald Ford; she received a Special Tony Award for the title role in the all-black production of Hello, Dolly!; she won a Daytime Emmy award; she was the first African-American to receive the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award; she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom; and she was awarded the Bronze Medallion, the highest award conferred upon civilians by New York City (Pearl Bailey, 2022). Pearl Bailey died at the age of 72 from arteriosclerosis (Pearl Bailey, 2022).
There is so much more that I haven’t covered here and, I promise, I will get to it. But for now, enjoy a little Christmas:
