If you were a reader of David Boles Blogs back in the day when we were more formally known as — GO INSIDE Magazine in the early 90’s — you will be as delighted as I was to hear from our venerable friend, and early ally, Joyce Kohl, who touched in this morning via the Boles Blogs Contact form to give us an update on her wonderful life.
One sunny morning in Pau, one of the neighbors came to take some plants for his garden. The elderly gentleman in the photograph on the right is Monsieur Romanov — a descendant of the Romanov family, rulers of Russia from 1613 until the Russian Revolution in 1917.
Continue reading → A Romanov in a Pau Garden: A Glorious Last Moment in Living History
As well as my beautiful fountain, I accumulated some more treasures from Pau which I promised to share. These are both made of wood, a material I have a great affinity for in all its states. I love trees and what they are crafted into. I love having pieces of history around me and our new house allows me to do just that.
Once again, these are huge, heavy, pieces of wood that were once fully functional equipment in rural Portugal.
In its previous life, this piece was a yoke for oxen who were attached to it and then were used to push – as opposed to pull other equipment around.
Continue reading → Wooden Yoke Treasures from Portugal via Pau
As you know by now, I spent some helping clear out the aged aunts house at Pau. The upside of this was that I was offered my choice of the goodies on offer — i.e first dibs on the treasure. There was one thing I particularly wanted, and I had the perfect space for it.
The piece looks unassuming — like a tired old door — which it is. In itself, it is an interesting object — showing its history in the layers of paint and the markings where the ornate hinges were once placed. It was recovered by Mr P’s aunt from a derelict nunnery in the south of France.
Every so often, we get someone who steps forward to decide our shared, national, record of events isn’t good enough in standard black and white — and so they take the task upon themselves to “convert” the established, memed, facts of black and white history into their color-coded version of hues — to reset, in their mind, what really happened.
This modernizing filter of alleged aesthetic and absolutely craven creativity is just as disturbing to me today as it was 30 years ago when I was an undergraduate Freshman at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln taking a film class with the great Dr. June Perry Levine.
At the time of Dr. Levine’s course, Ted Turner was in full-burst mode in his effort to “colorize” old black and white movies and television shows by adding color to give them new life on his cable channel.
Turner’s effect was horrible and gross as skin colors were orange and backgrounds were dark blue and clothing was all a shade of a mossy green: Time travel at its complete worst.
Adding new color to old black and white images is like repainting a fresco of Christ. The ultimate effect of each effort is the shared shameful same.
Continue reading → Coloring History: Should Facts Remain Black and White?
On April 23, 1910, Teddy Roosevelt presented a spectacular speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, France.
The title of his argument was — “Citizenship in a Republic” — and here is the famous “Man in The Arena” excerpt:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
When I was on my recent Red Squares walking tour of Jersey City, I happened upon some street construction that gave me a chance for an aesthetic and professional mulligan: Exposed cobblestones on their way to disappearing again for three decades!
I whipped out my new iPhone 5S and awkwardly began taking photographs to make up for a previously lost opportunity articulated here in a comments stream from two months ago:
I did not take photos of the cobblestones! Gah! I was always mesmerized by them and felt such sadness that the beauty would soon be covered up. I’ll have to look for another street in the area to document! …
Our cobblestones were like square granite bricks and they were put in the street end down — creating a long-lasting, and deep stone that would never wear away. …
I only know the cobblestones here are so massive because I tried to dig one out to keep! I couldn’t do it. Too massive. Too heavy. Too deeply seated in 1600 soil! …
They just covered up the old cobblestones again. They’ll be hidden for the next 30 years until they re-pave it all again.
Here we go! Caught, in situ, exposed cobblestones half-dead under hot, new, asphalt — and a burning morning sun — but now also half-alive for forever and a half-life, exposed, and memorialized here in this article!
As we creep closer to sliding into our graves, we cannot help but look back over the arc of our lives and be tempted to wonder what is and what might have been. There’s no regret in the ongoing evaluation of who we are and what we intended to become.
I always found it odd, and a little off-putting, growing up as a child in the Midwest, and having the older folks around me scan the obituaries page in the daily newspaper.
Looking for deaths — sometimes with both hope and regret — was maudlin and a little frightening to me, but the obit page was the final period on the end of a single image forged in sweat and hope against an impending darkness. You were okay to be forgotten as long as the descriptive bits of you found final ink on a page.
Now that I live in the New York City area, and moved by both time and tide, I cannot help but be driven by my Midwestern DNA to scan the obituaries page of the New York Times. It’s a wildly different experience reading the East Coast death roll call because these were the famous, and the infamous, and we are expected to remember them longer than the same sort of dead friends reported from the farmlands and valleys of the regular clarion — but we won’t.
Continue reading → Remembering Over Reinventing: Obituaries and the Unnamed
Tony Kushner is a well-known playwright, and his latest success was found in writing the screenplay for the movie — Lincoln — starring Daniel Day-Lewis. With each chit comes a chipping, and Connecticut Congressman Joe Courtney is rightly angry that Kushner intentionally changed history to add fake drama to the movie by deciding to invent two members of the Connecticut congressional delegation who voted against the 13th Amendment to the Constitution to end slavery. In actuality, all four members of the Connecticut representatives voted for ending slavery. Why would Kushner so deliberately skew what really happened?
Continue reading → Tony Kushner Head Fakes History with Lincoln Screenplay
I am not one to live in the past or have any regrets. History cannot be changed and regret only rots the promise of tomorrow. In putting together this new Boles Blog to reflect what came before in 14 other instances of thoughts and writing, I came upon the old Awards page for the now retired Go Inside Magazine; and I found great joy in looking back at those wildly created and brightly colored animated .GIFs, and I decided to share them with you here now. I moved the images off the now dead GoInside.com domain and placed them on the live Boles Books domain for serving, but I left the historical, clickable, URLs intact as a compendium of the greatest hits of what was, really, The Original Internet.
Do you recognize any of these websites? Animated .GIFs were big back in the mid-1990’s, and one good way to promote your new website was to “give an award” to another website — there were no blogs back then — and require a link back to your award website. The most elite award we won was from, at the time, the fledgling “Microsoft Network.” MSN was starting with a big bang and a booming promise and it was a Big Deal to get that congratulatory email from Microsoft telling us we were “The One” for a day. That single award from MSFT doubled our readership for the rest of our being.
Continue reading → Blast from the Go Inside Magazine Award Past!
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