#mark whalan

[dwellordream]

American Culture in the 1910s: Film Audiences and Exhibition Space

“At the start of the decade, most urban film-going Americans saw their films in nickelodeons. (Rural and small- town audiences formed an important market for films but were initially served by travelling shows in often makeshift venues.) Nickelodeons, which were usually small, poorly ventilated and cheaply run venues – often utilising old storefronts, with wooden benches for seating and a sheet of muslin for a projection screen – were then nearing the end of their extraordinary vogue, which had begun in 1905. 

Estimates vary but, at their peak year of 1908, there were approximately eight thousand nickelodeons nationwide; in Indianapolis in 1908, for example, there were twenty-one, only three years after the city’s first one opened. For a nickel, one gained admission to a theatre playing a programme on continuous loop. Usually with only one (hand-cranked) projector, the nickelodeons covered the changing of reels – or merely mixed up the programme – with vaudeville acts, ‘illustrated songs’ (projected slides accompanied by a local singer who performed in- house) or illustrated lectures. 

Westerns, melodrama and slapstick comedy were all popular, and ‘daily changes’ saw the programmes alter each day. The audiences were typically working class, were often immigrants and contained many children; on occasion nickelodeons even aggressively marketed their services as providing cheap, secure (and entertaining) childcare. As Roy Rosenzweig has noted, in 1912 in Worcester, Massachusetts, a labour report noted the average weekly leisure budget for local working-class families ran to twenty cents. 

In such circumstances the cinema – cheaper than other cheap amusements such as vaudeville, ten-cent melodrama or even saloons – had a decisive advantage, even if one discounts the enthralling nature of the films to these early audiences. But enthralled they were, and not as passive consumers of escapist fantasies, as cultural elites often charged (Young American architectural critic Lewis Mumford, for example, damned the cinema as a form of ‘spiritual masturbation’ which gave ‘jaded and throttled people the sensations of living without the direct experience of life’.)

Instead, as Steven Ross notes, ‘life inside these theaters was filled with talking, yelling, fighting, singing, and lots of laughter. Movie theaters were places where people could recapture the sense of aliveness that had been lost in the regimented factories of the era.’ The cinema was often referred to at this time as the ‘workingman’s academy’, and a survey of cinema audiences in Manhattan in 1910 found that 72 percent came from the blue-collar sector, 25 percent from the clerical workforce, and 3 percent from what the surveyors named the ‘leisure class’.

Exactly when, and how, the middle class was enticed into film-going is a matter of debate among film historians but this was one of the decisive shifts of the decade, and one which the far-sighted in the film industry assiduously encouraged. As with many forms of working-class recreation in the era, such as dancing and the saloon, nickelodeons attracted the attention of Progressive reformers and morality campaigners. 

They consistently critiqued their poorly lit, poorly ventilated halls, where ‘darkness afforded a cover for familiarity and sometimes even for immorality’, in the words of one report in Chicago. (Indeed, such concerns led to the widespread instigation of low-level lighting, rather than screenings in complete darkness.) Reformers worried about the sheer imaginative and ideological power of the cinema, how it was ‘literally making the minds of our urban populations today’, and functioning as ‘a place where people learn how to think, act, and feel’.

They praised ‘educational’ fare, such as the popular ‘travel films’ of the early decade, but agonised over other aspects of this new entertainment; these included the risks of white slavery to unescorted girls, the moral and socialising impact of films on an audience disproportionately composed of children, and the potential for copycat crime in films glamorising robbery, abduction and violence. More practically, reformers pointed out the very real risks of fi re, especially in an era of flammable nitrate film stock. 

‘Vulgar’ vaudeville shows, foreign (and especially French) films or films with strong working- class political sympathies were also regularly targeted, and this often dovetailed with industry attempts to ‘clean up’ the movies to attract the ‘better classes’. Voluntary self- censorship, as would be the case for much of the life of Hollywood, was seen as the answer to the issue of the moral and political governance of film content, and to this end the National Board of Censorship was instituted in 1909. 

Increasingly, and tied in with the move to feature- length productions, film- makers drew upon stories with the cultural cachet to attract the middle class; biblical and classical narratives were popular, as were adaptations of classic plays and novels, often featuring big-name stars from the ‘legitimate’ theatre. This was in contrast to early genres of film, such as chase movies, slapstick and fight films, which borrowed from the more ‘morally dubious’ styles of vaudeville.

Another factor enticing the middle class to the cinema was the development of converted high-class theatrical venues and purpose- built cinemas. With more seats and luxury than the typical nickelodeon, these began to occupy a larger percentage of the nation’s seating capacity in the decade. The nation’s film trade press lavished attention on spectacular ventures such as Samuel L. ‘Roxy’ Rothapfel’s Strand Theatre – the first purpose- built cinema on Broadway, which opened to its 3,500 capacity in April 1914 – even though such venues initially served only a fraction of the national film audience. (The average capacity in 1916 was 502 seats.) 

A sensation, the Strand’s decorative opulence attracted forty thousand patrons in its first week, all of whom paid more than five cents (a box seat cost half a dollar). As Rothapfel later commented, he aimed to make his patron feel ‘that he is our special guest and that nothing for his comfort and convenience has been overlooked’, and that ‘a policy of dignity, honesty, and good taste’ governed his programming. 

In May 1918 the weekly programme at the Strand included a live orchestral rendition of Franz Suppe’s ‘Light Cavalry’ Overture, a newsreel, an educational ‘scenic’ film, four popular songs, the Screen Classics feature Toys of Fate, and the First National comedy ‘Here Comes the Groom’. 

Nonetheless, as Richard Koszarski has pointed out, film viewing conditions in such venues were far from what contemporary audiences would expect: films were regularly butchered by exhibitors in these prestigious ‘first run’ houses to cut them to a length which fitted the overall programme, and projectionists would regularly speed up the projection through dull moments. Marcus Loew, one of the major forces in film exhibition of the era, summed up well the general disregard for the artefact of the film print: ‘We sell tickets to theaters, not movies.’”

- Mark Whalan, “Film and Vaudeville.” in American Culture in the 1910s

[parentlology-blog]

12 Best Celeb Parenting Hacks Everyone Should Know About

Parenting is a good thing, but it's also hard work. Which means, parents can use all the help they can get. Especially in their early years when they're often so sleep-deprived that we end up hallucinating.

You know who isn’t exempt from the hectic life of parenting? Celebrities. Whether you’re an account executive, a real-estate winner, or the star of a network television show, being a parent is the same. While we often turn to celebs for gossip, silly stories, orinspiration, they also turn out someclever parenting hacks and tricks that can make your life easier.

1. Kristen Bell

Kristen Bell is never afraid to talk about how challenging (and rewarding) it is to be a mom. She shared a parenting hack that made so much sense we had to pass it along. When her kids get out of the car, she says, “Hands on the circle.” The circle refers to the gas cap. If the kids’ hands are on it, they're safe from oncoming traffic while Bell unloads the trunk.

2. Chrissy Teigen

Chrissy Teigen is #parentinggoals. She isn’t afraid to tell it like it is. One of her best parenting hacks is about her baby’s bath time. If your baby doesn’t like bath time, bathe him or her with their swaddle blanket, which has been shown to calm a child. This will soothe them, and the muslin fabric is lightweight and breathable, allowing the water to soak through.

3. Kim Kardashian

When Kim Kardashian West brought Saint home, her daughter North was extremely jealous. Obviously, the new baby was getting a lot of mom’s attention, especially since she was breastfeeding. Kim slipped a milk box with a straw into her bra so that North could “nurse” alongside Saint.

4. Hilary Duff

One given of parenting is that we need to be prepared for anything. Hilary Duff, like many moms, brings along extra clothing in case of diaper messes. However, when her son Luca had a major diaper explosion on an airplane, she didn’t have a change of clothes for herself. Unfortunately, she wore the contents of Luca’s diaper for the last 90 minutes of her flight. Yuck! Now, she carries an extra t-shirt in her bag.

5. Busy Philips

Busy Philips is mom to daughters Cricket and Birdie. She uses the sibling rivalry between her girls to get the outcome she wants. She told Us Weekly, "I'm like, 'I feel like Cricket's going to finish her broccoli first,' and then Birdie's like, 'I can finish it first."

6. Sarah Michelle Gellar

Sarah Michelle Gellar learned how to curb food waste early on. When her daughter asked for a cup of milk and then didn't drink, she made her pay -- literally. She told her that every time she asked for a cup of milk and didn’t drink it, she would take a quarter out of her piggy bank. After all, someone has to pay for the milk.

7. Melissa McCarthy

It's important to keep the romance alive with your significant other and that can be hard during the hectic days of parenting. Melissa McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone schedule date night to coincide with the “early bird special.” That way, they're home early enough to put their kids to bed. And, they aren’t too tired to get up and make their girls breakfast in the morning.

8. Melissa Joan Hart

There's no pain quite like the pain of stepping on a Lego, and with three sons, Melissa Joan Hart knows this pain all too well. Taking matters into her own hands, she now uses a hanging jewelry organizer to store and separate Legos. The clear fronts on the compartments make it easy for her sons to see which Legos they want to use.

9. Tamera Mowry

Getting kids to bed can be a challenge. Tamera Mowry sets a bedtime routine for her kids. She wrote on her blog, "If you want a baby that will sleep through the night, the first step is getting them to fall asleep, and keep that routine to create consistency in their lives.” She also uses a sound machine to make her kids feel more at ease.

10. Drew Barrymore

Drew Barrymore uses a calendar to make it clear to her kids when she'll be away from home traveling or working. She explained her process in an Instagram post: “I circle with a sharpie every day I will be traveling. And I ask her to mark the day with an ‘X’ once it’s done. That way she can see that I am gone at first, still away in the middle, and then coming back towards the end. She now has a good sense of my geographic place from the globe. She knows when I am leaving and coming home."

11. Elka Graham Whalan

Olympic Swimmer ElkaWhalan is a mom of four. She came up with a great way to limit the junk food her kids eat. “Sometimes food” is cookies, juice, candy and things of this nature. “Everyday food” is healthier options. This way her kids associate the food they should be eating every day at a young age, forming good habits from the start.

12. Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis

When Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher had their second child, they bought a special crib to help get Dimitri to sleep. They got a “smart sleeper” crib called the Snoo. A sensor in it makes it move faster the louder the baby cries and puts them back to sleep.

[brattbeatweekly]

Souled Out Instrumentals by Jackson Whalan ||New album released by @jacksonwhalanmusic entitled Souled Out Instrumentals. “ I just released 5 beats to celebrate the two years of the ‘Souled Out’ EP being out. These are beats that I made with my close friends during my residency at SubStation Studio. Look it up on your music service of choice! Enjoy. And to all you rappers out there: I want to hear/see you rapping on these beats. Tag #souledoutinstrumentals in your post! 💙 Thank you for listening!” ||Learn more at www.jacksonwhalan.com Produced by Jackson Whalan Featured musicians: Ian C. Evans, Jules Jenssen, Tyler Gasek, Brian Ross, Mixing Engineers: Fran Cathcart, Mark Schwartz, Jackson Whalan Mastering Engineer: Ian Stewart Special thanks to Robby Baier and SubStation Studio

[dwellordream]

American Culture of the 1910s: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1914)

“In 1914 The Nation sniffed that ‘Only persons who like a story in which a maximum of preposterous incident is served up with a minimum of compunction can enjoy these casual pages.’ Yet, as it turned out, this applied to millions. First appearing as a serial in the pulp All Story in 1912, and as Tarzan of the Apes two years later, Tarzan became a minor industry over the course of the next thirty years. 

Burroughs’s creation accounts for between thirty and sixty million book sales of this and the twenty- three sequels; there were nine silent films, the first appearing in 1918, and many subsequent ones with sound – including six Johnny Weissmuller- Maureen O’Sullivan outings in the 1930s and 1940s, and the Disney treatment in 1999. Tarzan licences were sold for comic strips, radio shows and a huge range of merchandise, including bubble gum and sweatshirts.

Burroughs even bought a 540-acre ranch named Tarzana in 1919 with his proceeds, which formed the basis for today’s Tarzana – home to 30,000 people. A global icon, and one who taps into numerous long- standing national myths and legends of feral children and noble savages, Tarzan nonetheless mediates a host of commercial, sexual and racial issues informing the 1910s. As Burroughs suggested, ‘perhaps the fact that I lived in Chicago and yet hated cities and crowds of people made me write my first Tarzan story.’

He was also a failed businessman, having watched a series of small ventures collapse; he had been denied a place in Theodore Roosevelt’s famous Rough Riders regiment in the Spanish–American War; and, after a childhood in middle- class comfort, he had experienced the sharp end of American social mobility. As Gail Bederman notes, ‘he was, in short, precisely the sort of middle-class man who had most reason to crave potent new ways to remake ideologies of powerful manhood.’ 

He did so by yoking together a series of contradictions: a hero who is both primal and civilised, capable of murderous and wanton violence yet also capable of chivalrous restraint, the acme of racial perfection who reveals the degeneration of that very same racial stock, and a paper-thin fantasy of white male dominance whose popularity revealed the prevalent feelings of disempowerment among its many male readers. 

 The story begins as John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, and his wife Alice are on a diplomatic mission to West Africa. Greystoke is presented as the epitome of Anglo- Saxon racial supremacy, ‘the type of Englishman that one likes best to associate with the noblest monuments of historic achievement upon a thousand victorious battlefields – a strong, virile man – mentally, morally, and physically’.

Abandoned in Africa by their ship’s mutinous crew, they fall foul of a race of anthropoid apes, but their young son is adopted by a female ape who has just lost her own child. This ape, Kala, raises Tarzan (which means ‘white skin’ in the ape language) as her own. As he grows, his intelligence and skill with a knife he found at his father’s cabin gives him a supremacy over the tribe of apes and the other beasts of the jungle; he also teaches himself to read from primers left in the cabin. 

He terrorises the nearby village of black cannibalistic Africans, and frequently kills their men by hanging them with a noose made of vines – a method replete with the overtones of lynching which the text does little to dispel. When Tarzan is twenty, the beautiful Baltimorean Jane Porter, her father, and Tarzan’s cousin, Cecil Clayton, are similarly cast adrift. This sets in motion a plot which covers Tarzan’s rescue of Jane from a rapacious ape, their developing love for each other, Tarzan’s learning of his ancestral heritage, his travel to France and the United States and Jane’s eventual marriage to Cecil. 

Tarzan’s plot twists through some unlikely avenues, but it invariably engages a discussion of the problems and potential of American ‘civilization’. Tarzan is presented as effortlessly superior to Cecil in his ability to navigate the jungle and defend the castaways from its dangers, and his physique is lingered over in exactly the sort of ambivalent homoerotic terms which characterised the Popular Culture movement of the time, with its lavish photographic magazines of semi- naked men in bodybuilding poses. 

Such a representation mediates the common contemporary fear that American men were becoming ‘over civilised’ and effeminate, disconnected from what Theodore Roosevelt had earlier defined as the ‘strenuous life’ of toil, ennobling hardship and willingness to engage in righteous violence. Yet, Tarzan cannot be too uncivilised and still retain his heroic status. When he encounters the moral choices that undergird modern Western culture, Tarzan instinctively behaves ‘correctly’: he avoids eating the flesh of the black men he has killed, and he chooses not to rape Jane when he has the opportunity, in both cases because ‘heredity spoke louder than training’.

At the close of the novel, Tarzan arrives in Wisconsin, driving a car and having learned to speak French, to save Jane from a forest fire: yet she decides to marry his cousin instead, because, as Tarzan is now an urbane Frenchman, he no longer appeals to ‘the primal woman in her, as had the stalwart forest god’. Once he is civilised, he loses his sexual appeal; if he remained uncivilised, a life in America would be impossible. 

Tarzan ultimately founders on how contemporary American life could effectively reintegrate this version of masculinity – a masculinity of violent self-assertion which was frequently so longed for. This irresolution, however, was not what the public wanted. Tarzan’s early readers hated the ending which saw Jane and Tarzan fail to be married, and complained loudly enough that, within months, Burroughs was plotting a sequel in which they are reunited in Africa. Like other important texts of popular culture in the decade – The Birth of a Nation, in particular – the book is an articulation of Anglo-Saxon and male supremacy, a supremacy which Burroughs represents as justifi ably global and imperial in its character and methods. 

In suggesting that ‘re-masculinization’ might be difficult at home but is possible in adventures abroad, Tarzan thus plays a part in a broader cultural turn of normalising and legitimating American imperialism; it is worth noting that the United States invaded the sovereign nation of Haiti just a year after Tarzan was published, and remained there until 1934; and that, in the 1910s, US troops were still engaged in hostilities with ‘rebels’ in the Philippines, which had been transferred to American control in 1902.”

- Mark Whalan, “Fiction and Poetry.” in American Culture in the 1910s

[dwellordream]

American Culture in the 1910s: The Birth of a Nation (1915)

“If there is one film that stands at the centre of the interrelated developments in the economics, audiences, and the technical and narrative structures of film at this time, it is David Wark Griffith’s Civil War epic of 1915. Civil War pictures enjoyed a vogue in the 1910s, especially in the key fiftieth anniversary years of 1911, 1913 and 1915; ninety-eight such films were produced in 1913 alone. 

Griffith, a Kentuckian and the son of a Confederate veteran, had bought the rights to Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905), a successful novel and play which related how the Ku Klux Klan saved the white South from the supposed tyranny of black enfranchisement under radical reconstruction. 

(In a deal which contemporary novelists would swoon over, Dixon was paid $2,500 up front for the film rights, and received 25 percent of the profits). Such a sweeping historical project suited Griffith’s enormous ambitions for film; he had chafed at the restrictions at Biograph where, between 1907 and 1913, he had built the studio’s preeminent reputation for quality films with an astonishing and technically innovative body of work. 

Indeed, Biograph’s refusal to release Judith of Bethulia, his 1913 epic, partly because he had exceeded their length and budget restrictions without permission, prompted his resignation and signing with Mutual on the agreement that he could make two ‘special’ films per year. 

His first was The Birth of a Nation. Costing an unprecedented $60,000 to produce, and an almost equal amount in promotion and legal fees, Griffith’s twelve-reel film was the most costly, lengthy and expensive to see in cinema history up to that time. It was also by far the most successful: by the end of 1917 it had grossed sixty million dollars. The film dramatised the fates of two families, one from South Carolina, one from Pennsylvania, in the years surrounding the Civil War. 

The Southern Cameron family, headed by ‘Little Colonel’ Ben Cameron (Henry Walthall), are friendly with the northern Stoneman family, headed by Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis), the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives. Stoneman – modelled on the proponent of radical reconstruction, Thaddeus Stevens – is portrayed as possessing a variety of disastrous personal weaknesses, including vanity (he wears a wig), a fondness for bombast and, most pointedly, a predilection for his mulatto housekeeper, played by Mary Alden. 

Following the war, and the deaths of sons from both families as well as an elaborately staged reconstruction of Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre, Stoneman pursues a policy (to quote from Woodrow Wilson’s history of the period, which was used in many intertitles) designed to ‘put the white South under the heel of the black South’. To enforce this he ensures the appointment of Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), his mulatto henchman, as Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina. 

Meanwhile, Ben Cameron – recuperating in a northern hospital after heroic deeds on the battlefield – has fallen for Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish) who is working as a nurse there. The remainder of the film dramatises the threat to white southerners of this political policy, a threat continually dramatised in sexual terms as black men attempt to rape members of both the Stoneman and the Cameron families. The film’s climax comes as Cameron devises the idea of the Klan, which is hailed as ‘the organization that saved the South from the anarchy of black rule’. 

Riding to the rescue at the head of a huge posse of Klansmen, in scenes which had white audiences cheering, Cameron saves his sweetheart Elsie from the clutches of Lynch, and his sister from a horde of black militia. The double marriage at the close of the film sees ‘the former enemies of North and South . . . united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright’. Controversy attended this unvarnished white supremacist propaganda from the start. The National Board of Censorship voted fifteen to eight to pass the film, after insisting on cuts (such as a scene depicting the castration of the most malignant black rapist, Gus, and one showing ‘Lincoln’s solution’ of transporting black Americans back to Africa).

Riots broke out at screenings in Boston and Philadelphia, and the film was denied a release in several major cities. Moreover, the film was a major prompt to the formation of the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915 by William Simmons, a Methodist minister in Georgia. In the 1920s, the Klan would be a major political force for racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism and nativism, as its numbers swelled to over four million. 

Conversely, the film gave a great boost to the national profile of the recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which led a vigorous protest against the film aided by many sections of the liberal and Progressive media (Francis Hackett in the fledgling New Republic denounced it as ‘aggressively vicious and defamatory’; James Weldon Johnson saw Dixon’s attitude as one of ‘unreasoning hate’). Stung by such criticism, Griffith and Dixon mounted very public defences of the film’s historical accuracy and the principles of free speech in films, a publicity which adroitly fuelled the film’s notoriety and its box office returns. 

 One of the things which troubled critics most was the film’s astonishing technical virtuosity. ‘As a spectacle it is stupendous’, Hackett noted glumly, a feature which only added to its persuasiveness and ideological force. Indeed, critics who attempt to separate the film’s politics from its technical achievements often overlook the fact that it was precisely these technical achievements that gave those politics both an appeal and a legitimacy to millions of Americans. 

The war scenes are epic in scale; and the final ride of the Klan, using tracking shots, dramatic high camera angles, and fast-paced cross-cutting between three different locations, was the apogee of a technique which Griffith had perfected at Biograph (where, as Tom Gunning notes, he had frequently utilised the ‘archetypal drama of a threatened bourgeois household’).

 Scenes such as the final ball before the Confederate volunteers leave for war – lit strongly from above and behind, to give the characters a glow suggestive of the imminent destruction of a way of life – are beautifully composed; and, as Eileen Bowser notes, the scene of the Little Colonel’s homecoming, where the camera withdraws its omniscience at the moment he enters his home and his mother’s arms, has an undimmed emotive power. 

Yet, like the popular fiction of the era such as Tarzan of the Apes, the popularity of The Birth of a Nation must be partly ascribed to its indulgence of fantasies of sexual dominance. Griffith had even swapped Lillian Gish into the lead role of Elsie Stoneman in place of Blanche Sweet because – as Gish recalled – ‘I was very blonde and fragile-looking. The contrast with the dark man [a blacked-up George Siegmann] evidently pleased Mr. Griffith, for he said in front of everyone, “Maybe she would be more effective than the mature figure I had in mind.”’

A turning point in assessments of the aesthetic and economic potential of features, nonetheless the film’s ability to represent and market with such wild success such a disturbing and reactionary conjunction of race, gender and sexuality is one of the decade’s most disturbing cultural moments.”

- Mark Whalan, “Film and Vaudeville.” in American Culture in the 1910s