It’s all about baseball on Sunday, June 1 from 2 to 5 p.m., at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., 801 K Street, NW, at Mount Vernon Square. Take some swings in a baseball batting cage, get some pitching in at the dunking tank or grab some hugs from the Washington Nationals mascot, “Screech.” And check this out: the Nats are providing a grand prize to the winner of a scavenger hunt. Post-season tickets, perhaps?
The Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, which recently opened the exhibition, “Separate and Unequaled: Black Baseball in the District of Columbia,” is bringing in some players from the legendary Homestead Grays, one of the Negro Leagues’ top teams. Grays outfielders Frank Evans and James Tillman will be on hand to recall the era before Jackie Robinson integrated the Brooklyn Dodgers, when exceptional black baseball players (above:Homestead Grays catcher Josh Gibson at bat. Gibson was such a mighty hitter that he was often called the “Black Babe Ruth.”) were setting records and drawing capacity crowds here in Washington, D.C. at the long-gone Griffith Stadium.
The exhibition, on view at the Historical Society through October 15, chronicles the history of African Americans and baseball in the nation’s capital with 55 photographs, paintings, signed bats and balls, gloves, news clippings and other memorabilia illustrating the various amateur, collegiate (Howard University) and semi-pro black baseball teams.
For some, the idea of watching a foreign film induces enough cringing to warrant medical attention. There seems to be this prevailing attitude that if a movie is either silent, or shot in black and white, or is in any language other than English, it is for the highbrow crowd.
But keep in mind that there are a limited number of plot lines circling the globe—anywhere between one and 36, depending on whom you ask—so in spite of language barriers, every story has a universal quality at its core. The joy of foreign film is experiencing a different culture’s spin on the “same old, same old.”
Not long ago, the Freer Gallery of Art screened Dasepo Naughty Girls, a film adaptation of a popular Korean online-only comic strip, Multi-Cell Girl, that details the sex-capades of some rather naughty high school kids. (Sadly, this blogger could not access the Web site because he did not know enough Korean to be able to verify that he’s over the age of 19.)
Just as every nation has a Cinderella story, Dasepo makes one seriously wonder if the teenage sex comedy has more global cultural significance. Of greater interest is the film’s movie-musical format and how it riffs on this quintessentially American art form. However, a new twist for the Korean version; whenever a character burst into song, the lyrics appeared onscreen, karaoke-style.
If only we Americans had the temerity to unabashedly sing along in public with movie musicals. Sadly, the audience at the Freer didn’t go for it, not even for the obnoxiously catchy—though lyrically nonsensical—opening number. Dasepo is an empty calorie confection, a guilty, campy pleasure completely lacking in pretension—just like most mainstream American films.
And sorry, Charlie, it’s not currently available on Region 1 DVD, so chances are good that the only place you are ever going to see films like Dasepo is at cultural institutions like the Smithsonian.
The Freer’s Korean Film Festival wraps up with the animated feature Empress Chung on June 3. A listing of past Korean films shown at the Freer, as well as other Asian film programs running through the summer, can be found here.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used it in a sentence and wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. Here, for the uninformed is a definition, by way of a few of its synonyms: advertising, promotion, marketing, propaganda, push, puffery, buildup, boosting, fuss, excitement, informal hype, spiel, hullabaloo, splash. Packs some punch, doesn’t it?
Wendy Wick Reaves, the show’s curator says it has its origin in 19th-century circus rhetoric, “flamboyant hucksterism” (hmm, hucksterism, use that word in your next text message). Still not sure, though, I keyed the word into ProQuest, my favorite online database of old newspapers. Scribe Henry E. Dixey of The Chicago Daily Tribune reached across the decades and clued me in. His 1909 treatise follows:
It was the custom of dime museum proprietors to station in front of the ‘palatial palaces of public pleasure’ a leather lunged person who lied in a loud voice about the museum’s attractions, seeking to induce the passers-by to purchase tickets for the extraordinary exhibition within. This man’s speech was called a “ballyhoo.” The species is not yet extinct—he stands in front of animal shows, merry-go-rounds, loop-the-loops, midget cities, dime museums, and other art centers, with a small cane, a big black cigar, stripped clothes and a brassy voice, guffawing the glory of his wares to the chin-whiskered public who ’stop! pause! and consider!’ the ferocious falsehoods with which he beguiles them.
So, ballyhoo, or promotion, became the stuff of posters—graphic works used in advertising and marketing, wartime propaganda, presidential campaigns, protest movements and film and music promotion. Check out the ballyhoo in a poster about Thomas Edison’s phonograph. “It Talks! It Sings! It Laughs! It Plays Cornet Songs.”
The museum’s show emphasizes the portraits—of Buffalo Bill Cody, Buster Keaton, Greta Garbo, even Johnny Depp—in 60 posters from its collection. It’s a graphic feast. Huge, boisterous type sprawls across exhibition walls. Curator Reaves says the poster aesthetic is “fun, vivid.”
And that ain’t no ballyhoo.
(Photograph courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery: Thomas Alva Edison by Alfred S. Seer Engraver; Copy after: Mathew B. Brady, Color woodcut poster, c. 1878.)
Lectures offered around the Smithsonian tend to bear titles that range from the curiously vague (“Children at Play: An American History”) to the esoterically detailed (“Topics in Museum Conservation Lecture: Hygric Swelling of Stone”). So when a talk came up on “Protective Ornaments: Dressed for Defense” my editor sent me the details, with her own comic, free association:
“She narrowly escaped harm, when the bullet bounced off her 14-carat diamond.”
With that in mind, I headed over to the lecture, with visions of fiercely militarized gemstones mounted in sharply pronged settings already occupying my thoughts. And I wasn’t disappointed. Suzanne Ramljak, an art historian and editor of Metalsmith magazine took to a podium at Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery.
Was she suggesting, I wondered, that some latent warrior girl lurks within us when a woman utters the words: “I would just die for that necklace,” or “I can’t live without those earrings”? Jewelry is not usually considered a life or death matter, she said.
But delving into a photographic survey of historical protective ornaments–think armament like chain mail, helmets, and brass knuckles–spanning from the Stone Age to present day, it was clear that a case could be made that medieval protective gear could be considered a long lost cousin of today’s glitz. “Not just as accessories, but necessities,” she said.
Early stone necklaces, bracelets and anklets apparently served as a line of defense against animals, prone to attacking appendages. Jewelry adorned with claws and teeth and ornate helmets depicting the heads of ferocious creatures were donned so that their wearers inherited bestial characteristics. Today, people can be found safeguarding themselves with spiritual or superstitious charms like St. Christopher medals and four-leaf clovers.
Ramljak even noted some extreme examples of of “jewelry”–the ankle bracelet-cum-honing-device Martha Stewart wore when under house arrest and a locket designed to hold a potassium iodide pill to be taken in the case of nuclear disaster.
Check out the defensive and protective possibilities of the jewelry shown in the exhibition, “Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Drutt Collection,” on view at the Renwick Gallery through July 6.
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