In fact, the three-time Pulitzer prize-winning political cartoonist judged the “great communicator” rather harshly. In a 1984 portrayal, the 40th President of the United States is transformed into a television pitchman selling America an alternate reality—through the looking glass.
It was a rare president that escaped the wrath of Herblock’s pen and pad—weapons that the cartoonist said kicked the “big boys who kick the underdogs.”
On Tuesday, historian Sidney Hart of the National Portrait Gallery led a sneak peak preview of the Herblock exhibit entitled “Puncturing Pomposity,” which opens on May 2. The 40 cartoons span Herbert Lawrence Block’ s seven-decade career, which included 55 years at The Washington Post. He continued his artful commentary right up until shortly before his death in 2001 at age 91.
Hart said that both Nixon and Eisenhower, enraged by Herblock’s cartoons, canceled their subscriptions to the Post. Nixon claimed he didn’t want his daughters to be upset by the frequent skewering he endured and was even rumored to have started shaving twice daily because of the dark 5 o’clock shadow the cartoonist always gave him.
And while Herblock’s work usually had a liberal bent, the Democrats were granted no immunity. At the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a 1998 rendering shows William Jefferson Clinton, his head held high as he wades ankle deep in the thick mud.
It’s a treat to get an up close look at the original cartoons, which were culled from the archives of the 14,000 pieces the Herb Block Foundation donated to the Library of Congress. The thick black lines of his ink pen on the large drawings stand out sharply. It’s fascinating to examine the places where Herblock pasted a scrap of paper over a phrase, and rewrote a caption.
While the span of Herblock’s cartoons dates from New Deal to Great Society to Watergate, Hart said an election year was a good time for an exhibition to focus on the principles of poking fun at the presidency. A cautionary tale, so to speak, for the three hopeful candidates. What does the next generation of pen and ink critics have in store for them?
The exhibition makes also for irreverent contrast, housed in the hall adjacent to the museum’s stately collection of presidential portraits. Or as Martin Sullivan, the portrait gallery’s new director, puts it with understated elegance: Herblock lets us “explore the presidency in other dimensions.”
The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s film noir series commenced last Wednesday with a screening of Billy Wilder’ s pitch-perfect 1950 Hollywood satire, Sunset Boulevard. The crowds stayed away, but all six of us movie mavens in attendance were enthusiastically glued to the screen.
After all, we were grateful because these cinematic artworks demand to be seen on the big screen. And while, yes, the DVD market has been very good to old movies and the people who love them, the small screen diminishes their power.
Besides, film noir’s violence and moral corruption are as relevant today as they were in the 1940s and 50s. (That is, unless I’m totally mistaken and the world has been on one whopping acid trip of optimism in recent years). There’s no “happily ever after” in these cynical tales. Sunset Boulevard takes jabs at everything from the studio system to the downfall of the great silent cinema stars.
During Hollywood’s era of the morally righteous Hays Code days, stories had to be told with great subtlety—sex and violence were implied but infrequently seen. The viewer had to do the guesswork.Wild flights of imagination fill in the gaps as to what’s happening off a screen sanitized by the strict requirements. Thus, certain “mundane” actions—a furtive glance or a brief kiss—become endowed with powerful meaning so that a stagy gunshot has the impact of canon-blast. In Boulevard, aging actress Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, entices starving screenwriter William Holden’s Joe Gillis to live with her. Their onscreen token embrace and kiss are all we viewers need to establish her sugar-mamma intent of hot seduction.
This is partly why noir is so much fun to watch. Sorry, Tarrantino.
Then there’s the photography, which begs one to reconsider the aesthetic potential of Venetian blinds. Rooted in German Expressionism, the film noir environment is surreal with its low angles and ominous shadows that allude to the characters’ sinister psychologies. Yes, the protagonists are morally reprehensible, but they look fantastic—who cares about the horrible things that they do?
(The film noir series is free to the public and continues with “Double Indemnity,” which needs to be seen if only for Barbara Stanwyck’s bathrobe-clad entrance (May 7); and lastly, Bogie and Bacall in the 1946 cut of ”The Big Sleep” (May 21). Image: 42nd St.Nocturne by Xavier Ja. Barile, courtesy of SAAM.)
One morning still in a sleep-induced fog, I venture over to the Hirshhorn Museum.
There, I spiral into yet another dream sequence. Sheep, passing by in a herd, beg to be counted and the sight of a man’s chest rising and falling as he sleeps lulls me into synchronizing my own breath with his. Suddenly, I’m barreling around mountains in a train that’s passing through tunnels.
Or are those blackouts just my heavy eyelids blinking? I wouldn’t doubt it. Someone’s rattling in a dull monotone from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in the background, and not the part about the madeleine. That part I liked.
Next, I’m off the train and walking through a beam of light bursting through a smoky haze. Yikes! Two men are wrestling in the nude.
And, now, a weird creature with the head of David Bowie and the body of a doll appears. Really?
Bowie’s spouting off orders, but I don’t stick around to find out why because King Kong’s Fay Wray is in one of her screaming fits. She’s convulsing as if she’s being exorcised.
Not long after Wray’s screams fade, I’m hopping through some colorful video game world listening to soundtracks of birds chirping and water rushing. I follow a crowd to a light at the end of a tunnel, ride an escalator down a floor, pass through a revolving door and I’m spit out onto the sidewalk.
Was it all a dream? No. It was the museum’s exhibition “The Cinema Effect: Dreams”—a dark labyrinth of 20 film installations that plays out like a highbrow haunted house, and mentally jars my perception of fact and fiction, and dream and reality.
Now my life seems more fiction than fact, a film in the making. Could that street vendor and those guys unloading the truck be part of the plot? I was putty in the curators’ hands, one of whom said, “The cinematic is in the way we perceive the world, in the way we speak, in the way we dream.”
The exhibit is open through May 11.(Still from Tony Oursler’s Switch, 1996. Image courtesy the artist.Still from Steve McQueen’s Bear, 1993, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s collection. Image courtesy the artist.Still from Christoph Girardet’s, Release, 1996, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s collection. Image courtesy the artist.Still from Stan Douglas’s, Overture, 1986. Image courtesy David Zwirner, New York.Still from Michael Bell-Smith’s Up and Away, 2006, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s collection. Image courtesy the artist and Foxy Production, New York.)
Taught to avoid sloth? Meet 9-year-old Khali (right), a female sloth bear that came from the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle to become a non-breeding companion for the National Zoo’s 26-year-old male sloth bear Merlin. Sloth bears are slow-movers, thus their association with laziness or slothfulness, one of the seven-deadly sins. But the sloth bear is no lazy creature, the animals sport a slightly longer snout than other species of bear, and they industriously use it along with their lips to create a vacuum-like seal to suck up insects from holes, cracks and crevices.Khali arrived from Seattle late last year, but has only recently joined Merlin following gradual introductions between the pair. Sloth bears, found in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, are listed as vulnerable by the World Conservation Union, although there is no solid estimate of how many remain in the wild. In India, where many sloth bears are found, their numbers are declining mainly due to habitat loss, poaching and the use of the animals for an illegal practice known as “bear dancing.”In addition to Khali and Merlin, the National Zoo is also home to two other sloth bears, 13-year-old Hana, and her two-year-old cub, Balawat.(Photograph courtesy of Mehgan Murphy, The National Zoo)
Back in the early 20th century, long before computers or telephones were standard, postcards were like e-mail. The letter carrier stopped by three or four times each day and postcards were cheap, costing a mere penny to mail. You could send a card in the morning to a friend across the city to set up a date that night. It would arrive around noon, and your friend still had time to confirm before dinner.
Businesses learned that postcards were an easy way to advertise, and might print up thousands, says Jerry McCoy, a D.C. deltiologist (postcard enthusiast). Last week at the Smithsonian’s Postal Museum, McCoy, who works at the Washington, D.C. library’s Washingtoniana division, gave a presentation on what he calls “hometown Washington” postcards.
These old cards go beyond Washington’s iconic monuments, and leave a legacy of businesses, shops and restaurants of a bygone era. They “illustrate how much of our city has grown, changed and disappeared over the last century,” he says.
They’re also important historical documents. “Researchers almost never think of postcards as sources of visual information,” McCoy says. “But often the only place you can find photos of a business is on a postcard.”
For example, check out this postcard from the Casino Royal, a Chinese restaurant and hot night spot in the 1950s. On the back, comedian Cal Claude scribbled a message about his performance there with Nat King Cole in 1955.
McCoy visits the sites of his favorite postcards years later. By the 1980s, the Casino Royal was an adult entertainment theater and was heavily damaged in a 1985 fire.
The “Palais Royal” card, promoting a “dry goods and fancy goods” department store downtown, dates from 1907. McCoy says the original building was demolished in the 1990s, he visited the site to find an office building that copied the arched entrances of the Palais Royal.
McCoy searches eBay every day, easily spending $60 or $70 for a coveted card. But he says deltiology is more than a quirky hobby. “I’m buying history, buying back a piece of hometown D.C.”
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