Moonwalk One, the poetic, beautiful, fascinating film about the first moon landing was broadcast last night on one of the Discovery channels. Lost for 35 years and rediscovered about a year ago, it’s a mix of documentary and a sort of film-poem, both touching and informative.

Discovery decided to show the film with introductory and break segments, featuring an anonymous, young, doctor of space, telling us about times he spoke to a mission commander, or that the astronauts were spacemen, and you can see the moon if you go outside and look up. Banal stuff, especially in contrast to the film it surrounded.

Worse, though, was watching something really great, unlike the normal television documentary, only to have a presenter tell you what’s coming up, what you just saw, and what’s on now. Formula television, drab, pointless, half of its time spent pointing to the other half. In a way, it’s surprising, with more and more channels out there, more and more people making films, more freedom for people on the fringes or without a standard film education to take up their cameras and produce works interesting, works unusual, works defective or even imaginative, that we delve deeper into the world of structurally and formally monotonous television. Teenagers and their love triangles, cops and their murders, spies and their double agents, families and their comedic mishaps. All of them walking side-by-side, stopping, turning to face one another, and continuing their conversation in over-the-shoulder-shot-reverse-shot.

- Completely awesome Steve Jones lecture on whether human evolution has stopped. The stuff on Francis Galton was new to me - apparently he constructed a ‘beauty map’ of Britain which concluded that Aberdeen had the most mingers with the loveliest people in the country being found just outside Harrods. The latter finding might still hold.
- Six-day cycle racing was invented down the road from me in Islington. Possibly the weirdest sport ever, though it did indirectly promote the art of reading a newspaper while on your bike.
- Epic, must-read rant about the strange world of academic journals.

Awesome. Yersinia Pestis has photographed all the old WW2 bomb damage maps from the London County Council archives, transferred them to flickr, and made this nifty Google map marking some but not all of the strike sites. It’s like Web 2.0 but useful.

View V2 rockets on London in a larger map

Apart from telling a story of great human tragedy, the pattern of these bomb strikes persists in London’s idiosyncratic urban mix to this day, in that the sites were very frequently used for the construction of social housing estates in the post-war decades. Some of these estates have suffered from poor design, construction or management ever since, and social housing in general has become more ‘residualised’ as access has been rationed to the most needy cases. Combine that with the fact that the bombers generally tried to target the kind of areas of heavy manufacturing that have also suffered the worst job losses since the war, and you have a lot of places that stand out as pockets of lasting deprivation, more than 60 years after the bombs hit.

Update: Coincidentally, a new edition of Phyllis Pearsal’s original London A to Z from 1936 has just been published, and there’s an accompanying online map viewer which enables you to see some of the areas that suffered during the war, such as the stretch between Moorgate and Long Lane now occupied by the Barbican centre.

I’m reading Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year at the moment (it’s great), and trying to find out a bit more about him came across this account of an Islamic forerunner of Robinson Crusoe by the Andalusian polymath Ibn Tufayl a.k.a. Averroes, who appears to be due much of the credit for western civilisation as we know it having brought Aristotle and Plato back into prominence in Europe, and who is the sole non-Greek face in Raphael’s barmy but great The School of Athens, the inspiration for School of Rock. Also featured in The School of Athens is Alcibiades, who I only know from his starring role as an attractive maniac in Joseph Heller’s Picture This and who figured in the Peloponnesian War(s), subject of Donald Kagan’s book which Brad De Long links to criticism of while quoting a great passage from Thucydides which is so Heller-esque (Hellenic? Argh) that when an almost identical passage turned up in Picture This I had no idea it was basically a copy. Picture This (which is hard to find, but which everyone should read) is partly about faking history, which obviously got me thinking about Orson Welles’ F for Fake, which everyone should see and which is about faking art and life in general and which you can watch a bit of on YouTube in the form of either an awful trailer or the wonderful final scene at Chartres. And of course F for Fake deals in part with industrialist, movie tycoon, adventurer and noted fruitcake Howard Hughes, who had about as interesting a life as Daniel Defoe, who got me into this mess in the first place.

I thought this was fairly striking - an animated propaganda film made by Winsor McCay about the sinking of the Lusitania. The animation is very stylish and very powerful, quite reminiscent of Miyazaki I thought …

More about Winsor McCay from John Holbo here, and here’s the obligatory Wikipedia page, complete with a fantastic page from ‘Little Nemo’. I like the sound of ‘Dream of a Rarebit Fiend’.

This one’s for Conor, who’s going to be there soon enough: strange maps has a great map panorama and lots of wonderful detail about the San Francisco quake and fire of 1906.

The quake lasted 42 seconds, causing severe damage. Ruptured gas lines (and the scarcity of water due to ruptures in those lines) caused city-wide fires that eventually were responsible for up to 90% of the total destruction. Additionally, since the insurance companies didn’t refund the actual quake damage, many people set fire to their own homes. The fires raged for four days and nights. By that time, 80% of the city was destroyed. Estimates of the damage range from $500 million to as high as $1 billion (equivalent to as much as $300 billion in 2005 money).

The army was brought in to control the fires (which they did with dynamite and even artillery barrages) and stop the looting. In all, 500 presumed looters were shot. Some destruction and loss of life occurred outside San Francisco, but the bulk of the 3.000 casualties were to be regretted in the Golden Gate city itself. Three quarters of its population of 400.000 were made homeless. Half of those fled across the Bay to Oakland and Berkeley, others took up residence in massive camps of shacks and tents at Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, among other places.

Some of those camps were still open in 1908, indicating the slowness of the rebuilding effort (the city wouldn’t be considered ‘rebuilt’ until the Exposition of 1915). Up until then, San Francisco had been the undisputed economic centre of the West Coast. Los Angeles profited from the diversion of trade, industry and population, and eventually overtook its rival to the north.

I was going to upload this Peter Cook / Chris Morris conversation to YouTube, but a quick search reveals that ‘Ranagega’ has beaten me to it and, while s/he was at it, raised the art of juxtaposition to previously undreamt-of heights. See for yourself:

To follow up yesterday’s post about the Cushman collection, here’s a brilliant post from johnnygunn of Daily Kos with a wealth of great colour photos of ‘America before Pearl Harbour’, including some of Cushman’s.

It includes some interesting detail on early Kodachrome:

As the 1930s came to a close, Kodak came out with Kodachrome film – the first commercially viable color film available to the general public. In 1937 and 1938, the colors were still not stable and accurate, but by 1939 Kodachrome was producing color images of remarkable precision.

Now, not just anybody could buy this film. It cost $5 per roll and had to be sent back to Rochester, New York for development. By comparison, in 1938 Congress established the first minimum wage at 25 cents per hour.

Over the course of three decades from the late 1930s on Charles W. Cushman of Indiana traveled the world and photographed what he saw on colour Kodak slides. On his death some 14,500 of these were bequeathed to Indiana University, who have made the collection available online.

By any standards this is an amazing body of work: for colour and quality they already stand out from most photography of that era, but throw in the range of locations and subjects, and Cushman’s eye for composition and interesting detail and there’s a lot of wonderful stuff here.

Cushman went all over: there are thousands of photos from the US, and hundreds from the UK. Best of all, there are a few dozen from Ireland, including some fantastic shots from a June 1961 visit to Dublin.

[edit: Forgot to say, you can get a much bigger version of each photo by clicking the links provided]

Here is College Green, not much changed apart from the traffic:

O’Connell Bridge and the Liffey:

On O’Connell Bridge (complete with flags, green bus and Bolands delivery van):

On O’Connell St itself (they didn’t seem to go in for road markings much in those days):

Cyclists at the bottom of Great Georges St:

And further up Georges St (the Long Hall hasn’t changed much!):

And lastly for Ireland, here’s one from the Vico Road looking over Killiney Beach and up to the hill, so bright and clear it could have been taken yesterday:

Then there’s London, also in the early 1960s. There are great shots here of Trafalgar Square, Picadilly Circus at night, a ‘huckster’ in Aldgate market, a couple of authentic urchins, the Hippodrome when it wasn’t such a dive, and Covent Garden when it was still a working market (with old-school market men who could balance stacks of pallets on their heads). I love this shot of the South bank of the Thames east of London Bridge, when an area that is now a mix of offices (featuring insufferable yuppies like me) and various cultural activities was solid working docks.

Some of the best stuff comes from the Moorgate area. I’m including this one because I’ve actually been up in that tower (Pat works in the offices below):

And then there’s this one, probably the shot of the collection for me, looking north from London Wall over land still lying waste after the devastating bombs of WWII to the church of St Giles-Without-Cripplegate:

Five years later Cushman returned to find them building the Barbican around St Giles:

The earliest photos are American, and the effect of seeing things from such an early age in such vivid colour is pretty jarring. Here is a New York City street scene from 1941:

Here’s a hot-dog stand and here’s McSorley’s Old Ale House on East 7th St, which is still there today, more than can be said for many of the lower Manhattan neighbourhoods Cushman photographed.

Finally, proof that times really have changed: in 1941 even the bums were well-dressed:

Isledon, Ysendon, Isendune, Yseldon, Eyseldon … For hundreds of years the neighbourhood we now know and love as Islington was either so obscure or such a zany party town that nobody could agree what it was even called, according to this local church history site.

And this panoramic map of how Islington might have looked in Elizabethan times is rather good:

That’s St Mary’s Church on ‘The Upper Street’ circled (’The Lower Street’, now Essex Road, is on the right). Comparing with this fairly similar view from Google Earth, I think a few of the big inn-like buildings from the old map correspond to the sites of some of the area’s oldest pubs - obviously they go back a long way.

Check out the fantastic series of globes made by Ingo Günther at WorldProcessor. A few of my favourites: car populations, Nuclear Powers and Shadow States, forest fires and migration to New York City.

Via Stunned, here’s Pitchfork’s 100 Awesome Music Videos [that are available on YouTube]. From the first 10, I particularly love Triumph of a Heart from Bjork and Spike Jonze:

It’s that same old song: Girl is vaguely but essentially dissatisfied with cat; girl leaves cat and goes out for night of debauchery and soul-searching; soul-searching turns into a cappella orgy and bruises to the forehead; cat (who has undoubtedly been peering into his soul as well) picks up girl from the side of the road, immediately recognizing the passionate young pixie he fell for all those year ago; couple basks in renewed love and performs dance of happiness (and also cat becomes huge). Love is the answer.

Speaking of Spike Jonze, here’s a quite sweet short documentary he did about Al Gore in 2000.

Do you need a real-time weather report for central London showing current temperature, rainfall, wind speed and direction complete with interactive graphs up the wazoo? You do now. (From these people).

Today my train went over the Menai Strait between mainland Wales and Anglesey, scene of one of my favourite spectaculars from ancient history:

Meanwhile, on the far bank, thousands of tribesmen gathered. Whilst the Druids invoked dark forces on the invaders, the tribesmen beat their shields with the flat of their swords and cheered, jeered and insulted the Romans. Women - wild painted, shrieking madly - danced naked through the irregular ranks and waved torches of fire to warm their men folk to the heat of battle. The Roman historian Tacitus recorded that many of the soldiery stood ‘watching fearfully, their limbs shaking in terror’.

Okay, then the Romans massacred them, but still - could those Druids put on a show or what?

This great site from the Bradshaw Foundation chronicles the stop-start spread of humans around the world, showing the enormous impact of climatic (and volcanic) changes and linking to more pages on some amazing ancient art, among others the Chauvet cave paintings, Indian rock art and the Dabous Giraffes in Niger, which are between 8,000 and 10,000 years old: