#belle epoch

[kafkasapartment]

Snow in New York, 1902. Robert Henri,1865–1929. Oil on canvas.

[retroanimechris]

Astoria von Gopp, Gene's mother who is a social climber/a former French courtesan.

[fortunaestalta]

[statelibraryqueensland]

Details from portrait photograph of  an unknown young woman, ca. 1900-1910.

Original photograph from our collections here: LINK

[johnthestitcher]

Ballgown 1898-1900 by Charles Frederick Worth.

OMG! This is all kinds of black soutache braids sewn down onto a white background. How impeccably STUNNING! I’ll bet the corset was a BITCH to wear, though!

[incorrect-torchwoodsoho-quotes]

Norton: What are you writing? Belle: Torchwood wants to know what kind of weapons we have at the pub. I'm letting them know it's private information. Lizbeth, looking over Belle's shoulder: This just says 'fuck around and find out' in calligraphy.

[tricornonthecob]

Look I'm going to need each and every one of you to read about Evander Berry Wall, the King of the Dudes.

Highlights

*whispers* ohmygawd Chi-Chi the Chow-Chow

By the way. Robert "Bob" Hillaird was his nemesis (of COURSE he had a nemesis) and was nicknamed Handsome Bob

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_C.Hilliard(actor)

[jeanne-de-valois]

slams myself face-first into the work of Jules Chéret and wobbles out with Concepts

[pazzesco]

The Great Binge: The Drug-Fuelled “Belle Epoque”

The Belle Époque or La Belle Époque; French for "Beautiful Epoch" is a period of history, usually considered to begin around 1871–1880 and to end with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It was a period characterized by optimism, peace, economic prosperity, colonial expansion, and technological, scientific, and cultural innovations. In this era of France's cultural and artistic climate (particularly within Paris), the arts markedly flourished, and numerous masterpieces of literature, music, theatre, and visual art gained extensive recognition.

The Bar At Maxim's, Vintage Artwork By Pierre-Victor Galland

The Great Binge refers to the same period spanning 1870 to 1914 in North America. It was coined by modern historian Gradus Protus van der Belt to describe a time when drugs like cocaine, heroin, opium, absinthe, laudanum, and many more were freely available not just from your local pharmacy, tobaconists or the neighbourhood bar, but also from the barbershop, the stationers, and even confectioners.

Morphine by Albert Matignon - 1905

Georges Moreau de Tours - Les Morphinees The Morphine Takers - 1886

Between 1827 and 1842, over 27,000 pounds of opium came into the ports of the United States alone, where the drug found an unexpected distribution network of businessmen, presidential parents, and even Ivy League schools, which all had ties to the Opium trade in the late 19th century.

The Illustrated London News print of the clipper steamship Ly-ee-moon, built for the opium trade, c. 1859

“Princeton’s first large benefactor, John Green, funded his contribution through the opium trade […] Yale University’s infamous Skull and Bone society was funded by the most successful family of opium dealers in America,” reveals Harvard’s magazine, The Crimson, adding that as America’s gateway institution for the drug that soon spread to other Ivy Leagues along the East Coast, “Opium once pervaded campus life at Harvard […] throughout the 1800s, its black smoke kept the university’s veins flowing with green and its faculty and students perpetually dazed.”

The term “pipe dream” actually originates from the opium dens of turn of the century America where people smoking an opium pipe would come up with ideas, theories and fantasies whilst hallucinating.

In 1908, President Roosevelt appointed Hamilton Wright as the first Opium Commissioner in the United States to begin targeting opium dealers. The irony here is that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s grandfather, Warren Delano, was an opium peddler, and his drug trade was responsible for the bulk of the family’s fortune. Roosevelt’s mother, Sara Delano, travelled to Hong Kong with her family to join her opium-trading father in the 1860s.

Warren Delano (FDR's grandfather & Opium King)

Sara (FDR's mother) & Philippe Delano in 1864, following their return home from Hong Kong. (Franklin Roosevelt Library)

The crackdown on the Great Binge inevitably began with the signing of the 1912 International Opium Convention to suppress opium smoking and to limit it to medicinal purposes. In the 1920s, in the US, an anti-drug crusade also saw heroin cough drops and cocaine tablets to slowly disappear from stores and bathroom cabinets.

In the 1920s, in the US, an anti-drug crusade also saw heroin cough drops and cocaine tablets to slowly disappear from stores and bathroom cabinets.

During the Great Binge, the most notable drink in circulation was the Vin Mariani, an alcoholic beverage that combined both wine and cocaine.

Angelo Mariani, a French chemist who invented a very popular beverage in 1863.

Mariani tonic Wine — lithography by Jules Cheret

The French "Tonic" Wine received endorsements from Pope Leo XIII as well as many of the Belle Epoque’s most famous names, Sarah Bernhardt, Jules Verne and even Queen Victoria were all fans of the drug-infused cocktail.

Pope Leo XIII even allowed his face to be used in Vin Mariani’s marketing campaign. He was very much a brand ambassador, citing that it strengthened him “when prayer was insufficient”.

Mariani's "Tonic" would spent the following century cleaning up its act & rebranding itself to become the world’s most iconic household brand: Coca Cola

[fvriva]

you know there's something interesting about the way that contemporaries to the futurists were also like "they may have went off with their use of geometries but their ideology is so fash man" even before a number of the futurists went on to lick mussolini's toes

like, i'm in this latinamericano modernism/contemporary art history course rn and the entire fact that they looked at this art movement and aesthetic based on the semantic of CONSTANT, UNYIELDING TECHNOLOGICAL FORWARD MOMENTUM HEEDLESS OF THE CONSEQUENCES and went "maybe these euro fucks don't get to speak for us when they're preaching rails and cars and exploiting us for the ores while we don't have near that degree of wealth and would not benefit from this mindset" is speaking to me. it's almost as though contemporaries to artistic movements had their critical eyes on each other and it's not all just hindsight

[cephalopodiums]

Analysis of 'Aska i vinden' in a Disco Elysium context

So, another post about a hbd-core Swedish song inspired me to finally make this analysis of 'Aska i vinden', a song mentioned in DE.

Game quote: [failed the Shivers check in front of the FELD-building] YOU - "I am trying to ask the wind." TRANT HEIDELSTAM - "Ask the wind or 'Aska i Vinden' is the name of a Vaasan lullaby," he remarks. "Maybe that helps?"

'Aska i vinden' does not actually translate into 'ask the wind', it means 'ash in the wind'. It also isn't a lullaby irl, it is a pop song and I have not found any mention of it being inspired by a lullaby, it seems to be a wholly original song. (Vaasa and Vaasan is the DE equivalent of Sweden (roughly) and Swedish btw, if you didn't know that.)

Anyway, on to the lyrics analysis below the cut

Swedish lyrics │ English translation │ [DE parallels]

Jag kan se att du nått din gräns nu I can see that you have reached your limit now [Parallels to Dora having enough of Harry] Jag kan se vart allt tar slut I can see where it all comes to an end [Parallels to the end of their relationship] Jag kan se alla miljarder stjärnor I can see all billions¹ of stars [Kinda parallels the Inland Empire portrait] Tändas upp bara för att dö ut Light up just to die out [This line and the previous parallels with the quote 'In dark times, should the stars also go out?' from the communist side quest]

Jag ser dig nere på T-centralen I see you down by the central station² [While not a metro station, I feel this parallels the aerodrome in being large/prominent transportation infrastructure] Du rycker till när våra blickar möts You flinch when our gazes³ meet [Parallels with the discomfort Dolores Dei/Dora felt when Harry talks to her when she tried to leave for the aerodrome] Jag ser hoppet i dina ögon I see the hope in your eyes [What Harry saw, or probably more accurately thinks and wants to have seen in Dolores Dei/Dora's eyes] Tändas upp bara för att dö ut Light up just to die out [Maybe this is what happened, Dora hoping for just a normal goodbye and then realizing no, Harry will try into the last moment to get her back]

Spring, spring för ditt liv, du kommer aldrig hitta hem Run, run for your life, you will never find your way home [Parallels the thoughts Lonesome Long Way Home/Hobocop] Spring, spring, spring för livet, vänd dig aldrig om igen Run, run, run for your life⁴, never turn back around again [Parallels the thought Cleaning Out the Rooms and the various warnings the skills give when Harry wants to find out about his past, for example the letter in his ledger] Spring, spring för ditt liv, för du är närmre än du tror Run, run for your life, because you're closer than you think [Parallels both that Harry is close to death at all times and that his memories are also close, sometimes just needing reminders or a bit of thought to return to him] Snart så är vi aska i vinden Soon we are ash in the wind [Parallels both the inevitable death of everything by pale if 'we' is used to refer to the people of Elysium and if 'we' is used to refer to Harry and Dora together, their relationship, being over to the point of only being ash in the wind, Harry and Dora no longer being a 'we' or an 'us' like Dolores Dei says: The atoms don't form us anymore: us, our love, our unborn daughters...]

Det finns en plats där alla minnen hamnar There is a place where all memories⁵ end up [Parallels the pale and the thought Cleaning Out the Rooms] Där allting rensas ut Where everything is cleaned out⁶ [Parallels Cleaning out the rooms to a T, and maybe the origin point of the pale, the nothingness, not the gradient or curdled milk] Kanske en plats där vi kan andas Maybe a place where we can breath [Parallels that Harry has a little more "room to breathe" now that he has lost the baggage of his memories and also this parallels the lung and breath imagery in Elysium] Där vi kan andas ut Where we can breathe out [Same as above, maybe parallels this line from Conceptualization about the pale: Instead of air, you exhale thoughts. There are no trees that eat thoughts.]

Och jag kan se att du nått din gräns nu And I see that you have reached your limit⁷ now Jag kan se vart allt tar slut I can see where it all comes to an end⁷ [Same as above, but I want to add a parallel to Le Retour, girlchild revolution and the end of an era] [Also just this line, I want to add the parallel to Harry knows about the end of Revachol] Jag kan se alla miljarder stjärnor I can see all billions of stars Tändas upp bara för att dö ut Light up just to die out [Same as above, but I want to add parallels to the communists in the revolution (having stars as a symbol) and also the disco stars of The New, they may not be billions but it is often used hyperbolically]

Spring, spring för ditt liv, du kommer aldrig hitta hem Run, run for your life, you will never find your way home⁸ Spring, spring, spring för livet, vänd dig aldrig om igen Run, run, run for your life, never turn back around again⁹ Spring, spring för ditt liv, för du är närmre än du tror Run, run for your life, because you are closer than you think Snart så är vi aska i vinden Soon we are ash in the wind [Same as above but I also want to add the parallels to these Shivers lines: SHIVERS - Your hair is an oily mess flecked with ash from neighbouring coal plants. Smoke stacks rise somewhere in the distance. SHIVERS - COME MORNING, I CARRY INDUSTRIAL DUST AND LET IT SETTLE ON TREE LEAVES. I SHAKE THE DUST FROM THOSE LEAVES AND ONTO YOUR COAT. (La Revacholière would carry the ashes of people to a nice place)]

So yeah, there you have it. There are some more parallels in the translation notes and I will put just the lyrics in a reblog on this post, if you want them alone without my commentary.

¹Billions in short scale specifically. ²T-centralen is actually a specific Swedish metro station, it is the biggest station for the Stockholm metro. I chose to translate/localize it to central station to aid in understanding the scale, importance and meaning conveyed by the word T-central. ³My translation is probably a grammatical bastardization of the idiom meet [somebody's] gaze, but you get the meaning of it and it stays truer to the Swedish version. ⁴The sentence 'Spring för livet' does not literally tranlate to 'run for your life', but it is it's meaning. Literally it translates to 'run for life'. ('Spring för ditt liv' actually does literally translate to and mean 'run for your life'.) I find the change of phrasing fascinating, as it can ad an additional way to read that line of the lyrics as 'running for the concept of life itself'. ⁵Here you can translate the word 'minnen' (it is in the definitive form) into both 'memories' and 'the memories' because they are both definitive, but the translations have different connotations. Both connotations are in the Swedish meaning of the word 'minnen' and there is no way to specify which one without use of additional explanatory words. I chose the phrasing of 'memories' to better fit with the parallel to the pale, but 'the memories' could also work well, as the connotation of that is that it is Harry's memories and it fits with the next line about cleaning out, as it is that what he does with his memories according to the thought Cleaning Out the Rooms. ⁶The phrasing 'rensas ut' (it is in gerund form, passive voice) can be more accurately be translated to 'is cleared out' (gerund form, passive voice), but 'is cleaned out' (gerund form, passive voice) is also a perfectly good translation and I chose it to parallel the thought Cleaning Out the Rooms. ⁷I did not foot note this earlier because it would make the grammar of the translation and the current word is more accurate in meaning, but... The word 'gräns' can not only be translated as 'limit' but 'border' as well. And idk, the word border reminds me of the porch collapse, especially with the next line about seeing 'where it all comes to an end', or the alternative translation 'where it all ends'. Which is exactly what you see at the porch collapse, you see where the world ends and the pale begins. So if we take these alternative translations and suppose the 'you' being referred/spoken to is the world, then you can think of it as the singer seeing the porch collapse, the approach of the end of the world. ⁸A fun thing just in the act of translation, not necessarily a meaning you can extract from the Swedish text but... If you literally translate 'du kommer aldrig hitta hem' it is 'you will never find home'. And you can read that translation as not finding a place that fits you, in the societal sense. Like the various Copotypes and political leanings Harry tries out/thinks about to try and find himself, who he is, and what titles/roles (places) fit him. He is trying to find home, in an identity sense as well. And it doesn't have to be *back* home, it just has to be home, a new one will suffice too. ⁹I think the word 'again' could actually be left our in the translation, to give it another connotation that is included in 'vänd dig aldrig om igen'. I interpret the meaning of the Swedish sentence as both the meaning 'never turn back again' implying the singer has turned around before and 'never turn back' which does not imply the singer having turned back before. But am a bit unsure of that though, so take it with a grain of salt.

[kafkasapartment]

Hiawatha, c. 1871–1874. Augustus Saint-Gaudens,1848–1907. Marble.

[galacticlamps]

I can't believe Big Finish was so excited to tell me they had a new email address for their newsletter on Friday that they completely failed to use it to mention one of the #1 things I actually have been checking their newsletters for updates on, which incidentally they were already announcing on their website on Friday anyway.

(Honestly I'm rather ashamed of myself for taking this long to notice it, but also what do you expect? me to check twitter more regularly?)

Anyway, if you, like me, totally missed it, apparently June's Torchwood Monthly Range release is going to be a Norton & Andy one-off that seems to be inspired by Restoration-era Farce, of all things:

Which means in two months we're getting the first Torchwood Soho-adjacent standalone since Black Knight over two years ago (which I maintain is a very good audio, though I fully understand how it was bound to disappoint specifically as a replacement for Absent Friends), and the first Norton & Andy solo adventure since Goodbye Piccadilly in 2018 (which is borderline criminal)

[babajeza]

Sieben Mal Danke! – Thankful Thursday

Je nach Wetterlage beschäftige ich mich heute ein bisschen drinnen und ein bisschen draussen. Draussen konnte ich den Schneckenhag, den ich gestern in grosser Stückzahl geschenkt bekommen habe, um den Garten anbringen. Danke! Draussen ist auch die Wäsche im Wind getrocknet. Danke! Drinnen habe ich Koffer für die Weiterbildungsreise zu den Vulkanen gepackt. Danke! Und ich habe Rüschen genäht.…

[cryptotheism]

I want a pokemon game set in like, Prauge in the Belle Epoche. Gimme the story of the first modern Pokemon league match as an 1880s Grand Exhibition at the world's fair. Lemme be a scrappy street orphan, and the rival is the son of a diplomat from the Hoenn region back when they still had Edo period fashion.

Safari zone is a grand ecological exhibition of Mysterious Pokemon from the furthest reaches of the world. One of the Gym leaders is an ecologist from the Pokemon Congo Basin, here to show off his badass ultra-rare mokele-mbembe Pokemon [Dragon/water type].

The gym leader form Unova is like an actual pokemon cowboy. They don't even have balls over there they just lasso their Pokemon.

There's a Kalos Gym leader who is still mad about the recent revolution. Their gym tent is an ostentatious baroque chateau.

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

okay so i just recalled a little murdoch mysteries fact that i feel like tumblr ought to know

so the show is camp as hell with using historical figures as cameos right? everything is kinda overly dramatic and at the very least a little ridiculous in how they intersect with the show considering it's set during the belle epoch? tesla, conan doyle, roosevelt, etc?

I just fucking remembered since they usually adjust for age/time, they had an Annie Oakly cameo where she's this absolute smokeshow of a gunslinging milf in her mid-thirties