Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer first appeared in 1939 when the Montgomery Ward department store asked one of its copywriters, 34-year-old Robert L. May, to create a Christmas story the store could give away to shoppers as a promotional gimmick.

The retailer had been buying and giving away coloring books for Christmas every year; and it was decided that creating its own book would save money. In the first year of publication, 2.4 million copies of Rudolph's story were distributed by Montgomery Ward.

Robert L. May who was a copywriter for Montgomery Ward in Chicago and was apparently known by his peers to be good at writing limericks and children’s stories. Because of this, he was chosen to write a Christmas story to be used for this promotional coloring book.

May was very small as a child and was often picked on, so decided to make it an Ugly DucklingTwas the Night Before Christmas. While he was writing, he tested various versions of the story out on his four year old daughter, Barbara, until he and she were both happy with the results, at which point he presented it to his boss. May’s boss did not like it at first, due to the fact that he felt a red nose implied the reindeer had been drinking. However, once it was partially illustrated by Denver Gillen, who worked in Montgomery Ward’s art department and was a friend of Mays, his boss decided to approve the story.

In the first year after its creation, around 2.4 million copies of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer were given away. By 1946, over six million copies of the story had been distributed by Montgomery Ward, which was particularly impressive considering it wasn’t printed through most of WWII.

After the war, demand for the story skyrocketed, receiving its biggest boost when May’s brother in law, radio producer Johnny Marks, created a modified musical version of the story. The first version of this song was sung by Harry Brannon in 1948, but was made nationally popular by Gene Autry’s 1949 version, selling 2.5 million copies of that version in 1949 alone and has sold to date around 25 million copies.

Interestingly, despite the fact that May created the story of Rudolf and it was wildly popular, he did not at first receive any royalties from it because he had created it as an assignment for Montgomery Ward; thus, they held the copyright, not him. In a rare move for a business, in 1947, Montgomery Ward decided to give the copyright to May with no strings attached. At the time, May was deeply in debt due to medical bills from his wife’s terminal illness. Once the copyright was his, May quickly was able to pay off his debts and within a few years was able to quit working at Montgomery Ward, though just under a decade later he did go back and work for them again until retiring in 1971.

Bonus:

• It was Johnny Mark’s song version of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer that ended up being the version that has been adapted to TV and is po pularly known today. The TV special has since become the longest running Christmas special in history, having been telecast every year since 1964.
• The primary differences between the original story and the one we know today from the song and TV special are as follows. In the original story:
  • Rudolf did not live at the North Pole nor was he descended from one of Santa’s reindeer, but was a regular reindeer living elsewhere in the world.
  • Santa knew nothing of Rudolf until the end of the story when one foggy Christmas Eve he was delivering presents to Rudolf’s house and saw the glowing from Rudolf’s window. Due to the thickening fog that night, he decided to ask Rudolf to fly the lead.
• Despite being Jewish, Johnny Marks wrote many other Christmas songs, a few of which, like Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, have popularly survived today. These include: Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree; A Holly Jolly Christmas; and Run Rudolf Run, among others.
• Gene Autry’s 1949 version of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer is the only song in history to hit #1 in the United States and then one week later not appear anywhere on the charts (after Christmas).
• Before settling on “Rudolf”, May considered naming the red-nosed reindeer Rollo and Reginald, but thought the former was too jovial sounding and the l atter sounded too British.
• The voice actors who played Rudolph and Hermey in the stop motion CBS classic version of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer now both live in the same retirement community in Ontario.
• In that original TV version, Rudolf, Hermey, and Yukon Cornelius promise to help the toys on the Island of Misfit Toys. However, in that original version, once Rudolf and company leave the island, they never actually bother to help the toys. This resulted in numerous complaints that Rudolf broke his promise, so a new scene was added to the end where Rudolf leads Santa to the island to collect the toys.
• In Finland’s Santa tradition, they also now include a Rudolf character leading Santa’s sled. However, interestingly, in Finnish tradition, these reindeer do not fly.

  

A Book: The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends

Alice and Martin Provensen were a husband/wife illustration tag-team.
I loved this book when I was a kid.

The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends, 1959

Endpapers.

From - http://curiouspages.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html

Filmmaker Isabella Rossellini

TORONTO.- The Institute for Contemporary Culture (ICC) at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) presents Green Porno: Scandalous Sea, an art installation and series of short films written by and starring internationally-renowned actress and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini. Presented in partnership with the Toronto International Film Festival®: Future Projections, these two- to four-minute films, three of which receive their world premieres, illustrate in a humourously entertaining yet scientifically accurate portrayal the reproductive habits and ecological challenges of marine life. A variety of intricate and oversized paper sculptures and colourful costumes created for the Green Porno series accompanies the films.

Artist: Jeff Koons and RxArt

CHICAGO, IL.- RxArt, the non-profit organization that curates contemporary art installations in hospital settings, and Kiehl’s Since 1851, the venerable New York-based purveyor of fine quality skin and hair care, have partnered to bring the artwork of Jeff Koons to Chicago’'s Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital. Kiehl’s underwrote the fabrication and installation of works by world-renowned pop artist Jeff Koons on a CT Scanner and throughout the scanner room at Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital for RxArt. As a result of this project, Koons’ iconic characters will find a permanent home in the hospital’s radiology department, to soothe and cheer young patients and brighten the typically sterile and potentially scary testing environment.

To create the installation the CT Scanner was disassembled and painted, and decals featuring Koons’ Monkeys were applied to the machine. His iconic Balloon Dog, Hanging Heart, and Donkey imagery were also installed to brighten the room as wallscapes. Koons generously donated his artwork and took no fee for his participation in this project.




It's an exciting time in history as Washington leaders work to repair a broken U.S. healthcare system. At this critical moment, RxArt is hard at work as well - mending the broken spirit of patients caught in that failing system. Too often, patients arrive at our nation's hospitals defeated by their illness and overwhelmed by a healthcare maze which is burdensome. These challenges won't disappear overnight, even with comprehensive health reform. That's why RxArt is making steady, small improvements in our nation's hospitals right now - with creativity, we aim to improve the experience of healthcare treatment and steady patients who need relief. Tonight, when you discuss the latest in Washington healthcare politics, take a break and consider RxArt's small, yet creative approach to reform.

http://www.rxart.net/

Artist: Salvador Dali - Flordali

Salvador Dali

Fruits troués, from Flordali (Les Fruits) (M. & L. 349)
lithograph with drypoint in colours, 1969-1970, from the set of twelve, on hand-made Auvergne, signed in pencil, inscribed Epreuve d'artiste (an artist's proof from the separate suite aside from the portfolio edition of 35), published by Werbungs- und Commerz Union Anstalt, Vaduz, with wide margins, a crease at the lower right sheet edge and a thin vertical line of discolouration in the lower right margin, otherwise in good condition.

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), commonly known as Salvador Dalí (Catalan pronunciation: [səɫβəˈðo dəˈɫi]), was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres.

Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

The Great White Wail - The Colbert Report

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - The Great White Wail
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/367132/december-02-2010/the-word---the-great-white-wail?xrs=share_copy

Macy's Parade - Old Pictures

In the 1920s many of Macy's department store employees were first-generation immigrants. Proud of their new American heritage, they wanted to celebrate the United States holiday of Thanksgiving with the type of festival their parents had loved in Europe.

In 1927, the inaugural parade (originally known as the Macy's Christmas Parade and later the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Christmas Parade. was staged by the store. Employees and professional entertainers marched from 145th Street in Harlem to Macy's flagship store on 34th Street dressed in vibrant costumes.There were floats, professional bands and live animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo. At the end of that first parade, as has been the case with every parade since, Santa Claus was welcomed into Herald Square. At this first parade, however, the Jolly Old Elf was enthroned on the Macy's balcony at the 34th Street store entrance, where he was then "crowned" "King of the Kiddies."With an audience of over a quarter of a million people, the parade was such a success that Macy's declared it would become an annual event.

http://social.macys.com/parade2010/#/history

Artist: Nat Finkelstein, nicknamed “Nat the Hat

The photographer Nat Finkelstein, nicknamed “Nat the Hat”, was best known for his memorable chronicling of Andy Warhol’s Factory.
“I stayed at the Factory from 1964 till 1967,” Finkelstein told an interviewer in 2001. Then later, “I watched pop die and punk being born.”

His photographs of Warhol and his exotic acolytes are almost as recognisable as the artist’s own works. They include celebrated shots of Warhol with Bob Dylan, of Edie Sedgwick chewing her necklace, of the Velvet Underground with the German model Nico, and more.

Nathaniel Finkelstein was born in Coney Island in 1933; his father was a New York cab driver. He graduated from the respected Stuyvesant High School, Brooklyn, in 1950. He had artistic aspirations but, being entirely unable to draw, was uncertain how to achieve them. Then, in 1952, he bought a camera and enrolled at the Brooklyn College to study photography. There, inspired by such great photographers as Edward Steichen, Finkelstein found his métier behind the lens. He also developed his militant political tendencies, to the extent that he was expelled during his final term after hurling a filing cabinet through a window while protesting at the college’s censorship of a racy college rag.

All was not lost. Another of his tutors, the Russian émigré art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch (who famously brought Cocteau, Chagall and Man Ray to illustrate the magazine), had taken a shine to the feisty Borough boy and gave him a placement assisting on fashion shoots. Eventually Finkelstein developed this into regular assignments as a photojournalist on Sports Illustrated. There he specialised in photographing the mundane — bridge tournaments, chess matches and dog shows — because, he said: “I was the only one who could make them visually compelling.”

By his early twenties Finkelstein was well on the way to establishing himself as a bona fide photographer. He was signed up by the PIX and Black Star agencies (the latter supplied Life magazine with much imagery) through which he met his idol, the war photojournalist Robert Capa, and he spent time with such famous photographers as Eugene Smith and Andreas Feininger.

Finkelstein also capitalised on his knack for being at the right place at the right time, specialising in spotting and recording the rich and varied subcultures of New York City, in particular the burgeoning Harlem jazz and soul scenes.

“I used to sell Ella Fitzgerald and Errol Garner weed,” he told an interviewer. “That was like a golden passport into that world.”

In September 1962 Finkelstein got the break that would define his future. He was commissioned by Pageant magazine to do one of the first articles on Pop Art, entitled “What happens at a Happening?”. He found himself documenting a Claes Oldenburg “happening” in Greenwich Village.

Two years later Finkelstein was at a party at Warhol’s Factory and met the artist along with his crowd of beautiful malcontents. He was unable to tear himself away, and he spent the next three years photographing all and sundry. He took the first photographs of the Velvet Underground (whom he nicknamed “the Psychopath’s Rolling Stones”); he shot Warhol with Marcel Duchamp; Salvador Dalí and Allen Ginsberg introduced him to Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who shot and wounded Warhol with a handgun in 1968.

The relationship with the Factory suited both parties — Warhol enjoyed having a photographer to record his every nuance, and for Finkelstein there was no shortage of memorable subjects for his camera.

While diving in and out of the Factory, Finkelstein was also busy with other matters. A staunch political activist, he helped to co-ordinate civil rights rallies and anti-war demonstrations. This activity brought him into an association with the Black Panthers, for whom, according to his widow, Elizabeth, “he organised, trained and sourced munitions”.

As a consequence, in 1969 a judge issued a federal warrant for the arrest of Finkelstein in connection with an old drugs charge. Fearing for his life, he claimed, he fled the US and lived as a fugitive for the next dozen years. For some time he followed the hippy trail through the Middle East, selling hashish to make ends meet.

Eventually, the charges against him were dropped, and in 1982 Finkelstein returned to the US and its booming counterculture. He became involved in the New York punk music scene, briefly managing bands such as Khmer Rouge, and developed an addiction to cocaine, which prompted frequent visits to Bolivia to supply his needs more conveniently.

It took the death of Warhol in 1987 to persuade Finkelstein that he needed to claw himself back from the brink of over-excess. He pulled himself together, dusted down his negatives and published his second book, Andy Warhol: The Factory Years, 1964-1967. An exhibition at the V&A followed and prompted him, at the age of 56, to pick up his camera in earnest.

He moved first to London — where, in baseball cap, bomber jacket and sneakers, he was a constant presence on the rave scene — then to Amsterdam and back to New York, where he shot a generation of New York club kids for his book Merry Monsters (1993). Finkelstein now found himself in demand, travelling and exhibiting his work worldwide. He had more than 75 solo and group shows at museums and galleries, including Tate Modern, the V&A, the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. His photographs appeared in such magazines as Life, Time, Sports Illustrated, Harper’s & Queen, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine and the British broadsheets.

There is a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Idea Generation Gallery, London, from December, and his work will also feature in the exhibition Who Shot Rock at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, from the end of this month.

In his last years Finkelstein moved from his beloved Brooklyn to Shandaken in upstate New York to finish writing his memoirs, entitled The 14 Ounce Pound.

Finkelstein was married five times. He is survived by his wife Elizabeth.

Nat Finkelstein, photographer, was born on January 17, 1933. He died from complications of pneumonia and emphysema on October 2, 2009, aged 76

From Times Online October 17, 2009

Murakami - Macy's Parade Artist

Art Inflation: Macy’s Murakamis - New York Times - Thanksgiving

It is not uncommon for people to react with awe to their first up-close encounter with a balloon from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But when Takashi Murakami saw his contributions to Thursday’s event, he bowed. Twice.

On Wednesday afternoon, on a stretch of West 81st Street in Manhattan where brightly colored, 30-foot-tall inflatable versions of his characters Kaikai and Kiki were wriggling and writhing underneath a huge net, Mr. Murakami, the Japanese pop artist, held a brief Shinto ceremony for purity and luck. He stood at a table where he poured out a glass of water and a glass of sake in front of two plates, one of white rice and one of sea salt. He gave two bows and clapped twice, then declared the ritual complete.

Kaikai, a childlike character in a rabbit costume, and Kiki, an impish figure with three eyes and two dangling fangs, were ready to greet the parade-watching public.

In an interview after the ceremony Mr. Murakami, his bushy hair tied in a knot, seemed exuberant. He said he was less concerned about whether Kaikai and Kiki — who do not promote any television cartoon shows or breakfast cereals, and are merely ambassadors of Mr. Murakami’s own playfully esoteric art — could hold their own in the Macy’s parade than about Thursday morning’s weather.

“I was thinking about sunshine,” Mr. Murakami said in his broken English. “Tomorrow the report is a little bit rainy. But I already talk with my feng shui master in Taiwan, and he already take care about that.”

For the organizers of the Macy’s parade the addition of Mr. Murakami and his characters to its lineup is the fulfillment of a longtime goal and several years of work.

Robin Hall, the executive producer of the parade, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Murakami was one of a handful of artists Macy’s sought out when it started its series of balloons designed by internationally recognized artists in 2005.

The parade, Mr. Hall said, “is a snapshot of American culture.” While much of its roster is dedicated to readily identifiable figures like SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer, he said, “I do believe there’s room in this parade — and have always believed this — for high art.”

In that spirit the sculptor Tom Otterness created a Humpty Dumpty balloon for Macy’s in 2005, depicting that nursery-rhyme character suspended upside-down in a perpetual tumble. In 2007 the parade added a shimmering silver rabbit designed by Jeff Koons, and the following year incorporated a giant Keith Haring figure holding up a heart, to mark what would have been the artist’s 50th birthday.

In 2008 Macy’s also began communicating with Mr. Murakami, who in the global art scene is known as much for his inflatable sculptures of psychedelic anime-style cartoon characters as for the Louis Vuitton handbags and Casio watches he designs. But at that time he was preparing for a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum and could not immediately contribute to the parade.

This year Mr. Murakami sent word that he wanted to create balloons of Kaikai and Kiki. In response to e-mailed questions, he explained that the characters “in many ways represent the aesthetic philosophy behind my work.”

“They are cute yet fearsome,” he wrote, “modern and yet connected to the past. They embody eccentric beauty.”

The Macy’s parade studio in Hoboken, N.J., had only a few months to work on the designs with Mr. Murakami. Of particular concern to John Piper, the vice president of the studio, was whether the balloonified characters, with their gigantic heads and teeny-tiny limbs, would be able to achieve what he called free lift — meaning, Mr. Piper said, “that there’s enough helium inside the balloon to not only compensate for its weight but to make it fly.”

At an accelerated pace Mr. Piper and his team exchanged sketches with Mr. Murakami and his staff, and over the summer Mr. Piper chaperoned two small clay sculptures of the balloons on a trip to the artist’s Tokyo studio. (The sculptures, Mr. Piper said, traveled in “a very big, very sturdy piece of luggage, inside of which was a whole other steel structure to absorb any shock.”)

The completed balloons were flown for the first time this month at a Macy’s testing facility in South Dakota, but Mr. Murakami — who plans to accompany them in the parade wearing a flower costume of his own design — had not seen the finished works until Wednesday.

Nor, for that matter, have the thousands of children who will watch the parade live — or the millions who will watch on television — Thursday morning, and have likely never heard of Mr. Murakami.

Mr. Hall acknowledged that Kaikai and Kiki’s mix of cuteness and weirdness was pushing boundaries for Macy’s. “There are details about them that, I think in isolation, as they’re described, sound kind of grotesque,” Mr. Hall said. But, he added, “the final thing is not so bad.”

Ultimately, Mr. Hall said, Macy’s criterion for its parade balloons is “not a question of: Will the kids recognize it?”

“Our rule here,” he continued, “is whether the kids understand it or not? Will the kids like it?”

Watching the inflation of Kaikai and Kiki on 81st Street, Tami Marsden and her son Alex, 6, were less sure about what they were seeing.

“We don’t know who that is, but he knows Kung Fu Panda,” Ms. Marden said, indicating another nearby balloon. “I thought it was a Pokémon thing.”

She added: “I hate to say it, but boys really don’t like anything that’s pink.”

MALE ENHANCEMENTS: Suit-able Quilt

QUILT ENHANCEMENTS

Laura Fisher, a textiles dealer in Manhattan, knew that the e-mail announcement for her winter show would often end up in spam filters. She nonetheless gave it an attention-getting title, “Male Enhancements,” based on Viagra ads.

Her 30 quilts in the show are made of fabric from men’s clothing, including socks, neckties, long johns, shirt and pant cuffs, haberdashery labels for brands like Wear-Weev and Man-Brooke, and military uniforms and ribbons. Ms. Fisher, who runs her gallery out of overflowing storage units inside Hayes Storage and Logistics on East 61st Street, finds the artifacts full of “mystery and unanswered questions,” she said.

An Indian tailor working for British colonial regiments perhaps studded her checkerboard of pastel uniform scraps ($19,500) with sequins and gold braid. A church group may have raised funds by selling a quilt with rectangles from men’s suits ($3,800), embroidered with religious slogans and congregants’ names in spidery letters.

On a brown and tan blanket ($1,275) stitched for a toddler named Wesley, pink embroidered butterflies, cats and fruit contrast improbably with the macho fabric palette. Shimmering rayon used for vest linings runs along the back of a tweedy textile ($4,000), as if the quilter set out to imitate pragmatic suit construction. The squares on a brown and ivory quilt ($3,500) are arranged in giant bowties, as if in homage to the menswear theme.

“I look for the compositions that have thought, concept and planning behind them,” Ms. Fisher said. “They aren’t just sewn together.”

New York , New York -- 26 October 2010

Detail of "Roman Stripe"

(Laura Fisher at Fisher Heritage)

click to enlarge

"Eye Dazzler" (Laura Fisher at Fisher Heritage)

click to enlarge

"Log Cabin" (Laura Fisher at Fisher Heritage)

(ArtfixDaily.com)

New York City antiques dealer Laura Fisher will present visually distinctive antique quilts pieced from menswear suiting in an autumn exhibition and sale “MALE ENHANCEMENTS: Suit-able Quilts." The collection pays homage to the design inventiveness of quilters who turned woolen menswear fabrics into powerful American textile folk art. They will be available at FISHER HERITAGE, 305 East 61st St, 5th Floor (the Hayes Warehouse), October 11 - December 31, 2010; Monday-Friday, 11:00 am - 4:00 pm.

"This year both in fashion and home furnishings, menswear is suddenly 'hot" say editors who seem unaware of the history of menswear in America. For over a century in NYC’s garment industry, for example, manufacturing had flourished in every aspect of menswear production from fabric to finished garment. Sadly today most of that industry has disappeared overseas. These suiting quilts are thus a unique legacy and a powerful link to that heritage," Fisher notes. And, to thank the American Folk Art Museum for designating NYC's “Year of The Quilt", these antique suiting quilts are a cheeky acknowledgement to the good news that despite its financial issues, the Museum remains open for business.

Wool suiting, work clothing, or military uniforms make up these darker, some nearly monochromatic, quilts. They are unfamiliar to and had been dismissed by a collecting public for whom the quilt stereotype is one fashioned from pretty calico prints. But according to Fisher "menswear quilts are a new discovery for collectors, and at last are accorded respect across the globe as an indigenous textile art."

These materials were typically salvage -- what would be hailed as 'green' today - because they recycled waste woolens such as: suiting swatches from which the clients of tailors and fabric houses chose material for coats and pants; or cutting room remnants left from clothing manufacture; or no longer wearable family garments. Resources for the twills, tweeds, serges, gabardines and scotch plaids were outdated swatch books, or sacks of scraps from clothing construction that factories offered to workers and quilters. In some droll examples we can recognize the shape of the pants cuffs or sleeve ends that a tailor removed when shortening garments! And of course quilters used worn clothing, including even sturdy khaki from military uniforms no longer in service.

Often suiting quilts are a symphony in texture and weave rather than color contrast. The rectilinear compositions in charcoal gray, navy, black, camel or olive call to mind the modernist art work of painters like Sean Scully. While many antique ‘swatch’ quilts were simply set in rows without any design plan that might capitalize on the scraps' color variations, examples in this exhibition are dramatic graphic exceptions.

The menswear quilt phenomenon had a brief but historic presence in the U.S. It paralleled the emergence of the ready-made clothing industry across the country during the Industrial Revolution, and ebbed about a century later. Today because nearly all textile and clothing manufacturing operations have moved overseas, this menswear quilt style can never again reemerge here as it had proliferated from the mid-1800s through the mid- 1900s. As a result, this historic quilt bounty is newly appreciated. Transcending their utilitarian origin, thanks to their handsome palette and tonal sophistication they are a studied aesthetic with a fascinating back story.

Artist: Alberto Cerriteño

Alberto Cerriteño is a Mexican illustrator & designer who has lived in America; Portland for nearly four years now. Strongly inspired by urban vinyl toys, alternative cartoons, and the pop surrealism movement, Alberto Cerriteño has developed his own very personal technique and style, having always present a delicate hints of traditional Mexican artistic influences in his management of rich textures and decorative patterns. These contrast strikingly with the blending of desaturated colors and ink, sometimes featuring a vintage coffee finish.

http://www.albertocerriteno.com/gallery01.html