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Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Type Tuesday - Papyrus: revue de toutes les industries du papier et de l'imprimerie and du livre

The French journal on paper and the paper trade, Papyrus: revue de toutes les industries du papier et de l'imrimerie and du livre, provided a directory and review of the paper industry and trade in not only France and the French colonies, but also Great Britain, Switzerland, Belgium and the United States. 

The journal's covers masked the more technical purpose of the trade journal, with bright colors, heavy embossed details, gold lettering and Egyptian-themed illustrations. 










The Kemble Collection on Western Printing and Publishing holds a near complete run of the journal between the years of 1926 and 1930. 

Jaime Henderson
Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

Saturday, December 19, 2015

150 Years Ago Today: California Ratifies the 13th Amendment Abolishing Slavery

(Detail) Constitutional Amendment Abolishing Slavery;
In Legislature of California, Sixteenth Session, 1865 & 1866
Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. —Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
On January 31, 1865—just four months before the Civil War ended with the surrender of the Confederate Army—the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill proposing to amend the United States Constitution. The next day, on February 1, President Lincoln signed the Joint Resolution Proposing the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, clearing the way for ratification of the amendment to abolish slavery.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Anna Halprin: Dance for the Ages

Peace Dove, 2014
Photo © Sue Heinemann
At Anna Halprin’s workshop at Moa Oasis, an ecological retreat in the southern Israeli desert, participants from all over the world created a ritual for peace, followed by a spontaneous dance of joy.

“Martha Graham used to say it takes 10 years to make a dancer,” Anna Halprin has said. “I think it takes more like 10 seconds.’”

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “Halprin’s rebellion was to declare that any movement, performed with presence and intention, could be a dance, and anybody could be a dancer.”

Many of Halprin’s 150 dance theater works not only have appealed to people of all ages but have withstood the test of time. Some are still being performed all over the world—a testament to the relevance of Halprin’s dance/movement philosophy today.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

The 1960s Revisited: A 50th Anniversary Celebration

Since the mid-20th century, San Francisco has been a beacon supporting underground movements, a vibrant arts and culture scene, and being one of the top music destinations in the world. Its dedication to preserving a singular voice – often independent of national trends – sets it apart from other highly sought-after international destinations. With the current influx of a stunning number of technology companies occupying the regional landscape, it’s essential to take a step back and reexamine pivotal historical moments that helped shape San Francisco into the tech hub and arts mecca it is today.

The 1960s Revisited kicks off on the exact 50th anniversary of one of the most celebrated events of the 1960s counterculture: The Trips Festival. Considered a watershed event in the history of San Francisco’s underground arts scene, the launch of the psychedelic 1960s era, and a pivotal event in the growth of the region’s technology industry, The Trips Festival was the first large convention (essentially a widely attended and publicized Acid Test) bringing together all the major Bay Area figures in rock ‘n roll, beat poetry, technology, experimental theater, dance, indie films, light show production, overhead visual projections, costume design, and of course Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters distributing LSD throughout the crowd. Virtually the entire local avant-garde was involved: Committee TheaterSan Francisco Mime TroupeOpen Theater, and San Francisco Tape Music CenterAnna Halprin and the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop participated in the Trips Festival.

Stewart Brand emerged from The Trips Festival as a countercultural entrepreneur, and it set forth Bill Graham’s legacy at the Fillmore (Brand conceived The Trips Festival, while Graham organized it with Kesey and Ramon Sender). The festival itself, which had an attendance of 6,000 people, was as Walter Isaacson says in his book Innovators, “a quintessential display of the fusion that shaped the personal computer era: technology, counterculture, entrepreneurship, gadgets, music, art and engineering…. From Stewart Brand to Steve Jobs, those ingredients fashioned a wave of Bay Area innovators who were comfortable at the interface of Silicon Valley and Haight-Ashbury….”

“The Trips Festival flared of individual expression and collective communion under the spell of its incredible arts production,” says Michael Kramer (author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture). “It set the stage for many experiments and innovations to come, from rock festivals to performance art to flash mobs to Burning Man to the Internet itself.”

The Trips Festival documented the emerging social movement that would soon culminate in 1967 with thousands of youth from around the country migrating to Haight-Ashbury, the Human Be-In, and the Summer of Love. The Trips Festival was an all-inclusive affair, bringing the brightest minds across diverse fields together for what’s now considered the birth of the Haight-Ashbury era. The festival served as one of the first official Grateful Dead concerts. Post-modern dance pioneer Anna Halprin (Founder, Dancers’ Workshop) engaged as a self-described movement “catalyst,” giving audience members ideas for dancing.

The California Historical Society is proud to host a 3-Day Arts Festival featuring renowned scholars in conversation regarding the monumental cultural impact of several 1966 happenings. The 1960s Revisited: A 50th Anniversary Celebration includes four events:

January 22, 2016: The Music, Technology & Significance of The Trips FestivalJanuary 22, 2016: Looking Back: The Dawn of the Grateful DeadJanuary 22, 2016: VIP Reception with Stewart BrandJanuary 23, 2016: Independent Psychedelic Film Festival

The Music, Technology & Significance of The Trips Festival
January 22, 2016, 1:00 - 4:00 PM
The Contemporary Jewish Museum
Learn More

As Andrew Kirk notes in his most recent book, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism, “The Trips Festival was not the first event of the era to unite commerce and technology with the cultural trends of the sixties, but it captured an important convergence of interests better than any previous single happening.” The technology symposium spotlights the influence of The Trips Festival and San Francisco’s mid-1960s counterculture movement on the emerging personal computer era. A keynote speech from author/historian Michael Kramer will set the stage for an intriguing panel of authors and historians, including Greg CastilloDavid Bernstein, and Andrew Kirk. Film Director Eric Christensen will also make a special introduction prior to the screening of his famed documentary, The Trips Festival Movie.

Michael J. Kramer is a historian, writer, teacher, dramaturg, editor, and author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (Oxford University Press, 2013). His latest book-in-progress, This Machine Kills Fascists: Technology and Culture in the US Folk Music Revival, revises understandings of the folk revival as an anti-modernist movement, arguing instead that it offers a hidden history of people grappling with how to live more humanely in an increasingly technological society. With a related multimedia project, he focuses on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, which ran on the University of California, Berkeley campus from 1958 - 1970. Kramer’s also at work on a set of essays about intellectuals and the counterculture. He has served as an editor at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the New York Times, and currently teaches various courses (history, American studies, digital humanities, and civic engagement) at Northwestern University.

Greg Castillo, an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at University of California, Berkeley, has investigated the Bay Area’s counterculture design legacy through a U.C. Berkeley Arts Research Center Fellowship (2014) and an Associate Professor Fellowship from the Townsend Center for the Humanities. His research informed a 2014 exhibition, Design Radicals: Creativity and Protest in Wurster Hall, reviewing “outlaw design” enterprises undertaken by faculty and students in the late-1960s and early-1970s at U.C. Berkeley. For the catalogue of the Walker Art Center exhibition on counterculture design, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for UtopiaCastillo contributed the essay “Counterculture Terroir: California’s Hippie Enterprise Zone” and delivered a public lecture at the exhibition’s opening symposium. Castillo will serve as Guest Curator for the expanded Hippie Modernism exhibition when it travels to the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive in February 2017.

David W. Bernstein is Professor of Music and Head of the Music Department at Mills College. His various publications include The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-GardeWritings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art (co-edited with Christopher Hatch), Cage (Re)Considereda special double issue of Contemporary Music Review, and essays for Cage & Consequences, ed. Julia Schröder and Volker Straebel; The New York Schools of Music and the Visual Arts, ed., Steven Johnson; the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed., Thomas Christensen; TheoriaJournal of the Arnold Schoenberg Center, Music Theory SpectrumContemporary Music Review, and Current Musicology. Bernstein is presently writing a book on Pauline Oliveros for the University of Illinois Press and Experiments in the Fault Zonea history of experimental music at Mills College. He is also editor of Music Theory Spectrum, the flagship journal of the Society for Music Theory.

Director Eric Christensen’s independent documentary, The Trips Festival Movie, offers an in-depth look inside the famed Trips Festival. Due to the lack of footage taken at the actual festival, the film relies on fascinating photos, interviews with some of The Trips Festival’s organizers such as Stewart BrandKen Kesey and Bill Graham, and a wild and bizarre short of the festival shot by experimental filmmaker Ben Van Meter. The Trips Festival is said to have birthed the entire hippie scene and the revolution of the late 1960s. Influences of The Trips Festival can be seen in present day festivals such as Bonnaroo and Burning Man. Actor Peter Coyote narrates the film.

The 1960s Revisited
January 22, 2016

Obscura Digital
Get Tickets

The 1960s Revisited kicks off on the exact 50th anniversary of one of the most celebrated events of the 1960s counterculture: The Trips Festival. Considered a watershed event in the history of San Francisco’s underground arts scene, the launch of the psychedelic 1960s era, and a pivotal event in the growth of the region’s technology industry, The Trips Festival was the first large convention (essentially a widely attended and publicized Acid Test) bringing together all the major Bay Area figures in rock ‘n roll, beat poetry, technology, experimental theater, dance, indie films, light show production, overhead visual projections, costume design, and of course Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters distributing LSD throughout the crowd. Virtually the entire local avant-garde was involved: Committee Theater, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Open Theater, and San Francisco Tape Music Center. Anna Halprin and the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop participated in the Trips Festival.

Stewart Brand emerged from The Trips Festival as a countercultural entrepreneur, and it set forth Bill Graham’s legacy at the Fillmore (Brand conceived The Trips Festival, while Graham organized it with Kesey and Ramon Sender). The festival itself, which had an attendance of 6,000 people, was as Walter Isaacson says in his book Innovators, “a quintessential display of the fusion that shaped the personal computer era: technology, counterculture, entrepreneurship, gadgets, music, art and engineering…. From Stewart Brand to Steve Jobs, those ingredients fashioned a wave of Bay Area innovators who were comfortable at the interface of Silicon Valley and Haight-Ashbury….”
Schedule:

6:00 PM - Looking Back: The Dawn of the Grateful Dead 
Featuring Peter Richardson, Dennis McNally and Nicholas Meriwether
Many of the initial Grateful Dead performances were as the primary band for the Acid Tests, including at The Trips Festival. It’s well documented that the Dead went on to become one of the century’s most influential groups in rock history. With their shows operating more like social laboratories, fans and the band alike were on a collective musical and psychological crusade. The beginning days of the Dead will be the focus of this panel discussion featuring Peter Richardson, Dennis McNally and Nicholas Meriwether.

7:00 PM - Reception with special guests Stewart BrandJoin Peter Richardson, Dennis McNally, Nicholas Meriwether, Stewart Brand, and many others at a special reception celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Trips Festival and the dawn of the 1960s. Enjoy craft cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, and the incredible creations of Obscura Digital. 

Independent Psychedelic Film Festival
January 23, 2016, 12:00 - 6:00 PM
Hobart Building
Get Tickets

The California Historical Society completes its 3-Day Arts Festival with the public screenings of three period films: The Trips Festival Movie, Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, Rockin’ at the Red Dog: The Dawn of Psychedelic Rock.

Films:

Magic Trip: Ken Key’s Search for a Kool Place is a freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Band of Prankesters’ legendary cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair in 1964. Until the film’s release date in August 2011, the footage of the road trip had never been seen before. The footage serves as a rare and extraordinary piece of American history that most have no understanding of. The film was directed by OSCAR-winning director Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood.

Rockin’ At The Red Dog: The Dawn of Psychedelic Rock documentary chronicles the history behind the wild times at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada. It is said that the psychedelic sixties were partially conceived there. The film stars The CharlatansBig Brother and the Holding CompanyDon & Roz Works, and Lynne Hughes. The film is directed by Mary Works. It was originally released in 1996 under the title The Life and Times of the Red Dog Saloon, but in 2005 when it was re-released on DVD, the title changed to Rockin’ At The Red Dog: The Dawn of Psychedelic Rock.

Director Eric Christensen’s independent documentary, The Trips Festival Movie, offers an in-depth look inside the famed Trips Festival. Due to the lack of footage taken at the actual festival, the film relies on fascinating photos, interviews with some of The Trips Festival’s organizers such as Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey and Bill Graham, and a wild and bizarre short of the festival shot by experimental filmmaker Ben Van Meter. The Trips Festival is said to have birthed the entire hippie scene and the revolution of the late 1960s. Influences of The Trips Festival can be seen in present day festivals such as Bonnaroo and Burning Man. Actor Peter Coyote narrates the film.

Urban Renaissance with Mermaids: Lawrence Halprin’s Ghirardelli Square

Ghirardelli Square
Courtesy of Fairmont Heritage Place
Today we know that the revival of the urban inner city begins with the restoration and re-use of old buildings. Cities that have preserved their old downtowns and industrial districts find in them the seeds to begin anew. Seeking community, people and businesses from Brooklyn to Portland to Oakland now flock to restored buildings to make their homes or to build businesses—eschewing suburbia for urban buzz.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Celebrating the Legendary Dance Pioneer Anna Halprin


Anna Halprin; photo by Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle
As 2015 comes to a close, so, too, does the year-long, worldwide 95th birthday celebration for the postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin. National and international tributes have brought a renewed focus to Anna’s contributions to performance, choreography, and dance education.

Type Tuesday - International Typeface Corporation specimen booklets

More of our short series on 1970s-era International Typeface Corporation specimen booklets. 






Jaime Henderson
Archivist
jhederson@calhist.org

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

The Los Angeles Triforium Turns 40

The Triforium today with City Hall in the background, Los Angeles, December 2015
Courtesy of Jessica Hough
“Just as the Statue of Liberty made the Port of New York the most memorable symbol of America in the 20th Century, so now the TRIFORIUM’s astronautical beacon, a triad of rotating laser beams soaring into outer space, can make Los Angeles the first city to lead America into the 21st Century.”–Joseph L. Young

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Type Tuesday - Black Letters from Francis Hart and Company



Today we feature pointed texts and black letters from the printing office of  Francis Hart and Company, New York. For a closer look at these specimens, take a look at the CHS page on Behance, featuring these and other materials from our Kemble Collection on Western Printing and Publishing. 













Jaime Henderson
Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

Monday, December 7, 2015

This Day in History: The Bombing of Pearl Harbor—Defending the Country, Confronting Fears

Troops in Vehicles Lining Crissy Field, 1941
Courtesy of National Park Service
In the recent controversy over Syrian refugees, some Americans have likened refusal to provide the refugees a haven in the United States to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Type Tuesday - International Typeface Corporation specimens


A recent donation of International Typeface Corporation specimen booklets has so impressed me with their bold colors and stylistic fonts that I thought I would share a few over the next few weeks. 

International Typeface Corporation (ITC) was started in New York in 1970, making it one of the first foundries to have no history in the production of metal type. Instead, ITC designed, licensed and marketed typefaces for filmsetting and computer set types. 






ITC's journal U&lc (Upper and Lower Case) features an advertisement and order form for each of the ITC specimen books. Although the Kemble Collection's holdings include most of these specimens, I do spot some unfamiliar specimens featured in this ad.



What delightful specimens to be on the lookout for!

Jaime Henderson
Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Type Tuesday - Mead Paper advertisements

Today we showcase a few Mead Paper advertisements from the early 1950s. These advertisements were originally featured in Better Impressions, the journal of the Mead Corporation, a paper company dating back to 1846.


Saturday, November 21, 2015

70 Years Ago Today: World War II Incarceration Camp at Manzanar Closes

Carol Highsmith, Guard Tower at Manzanar War Relocation Center, 2013
Library of Congress
On the bitter cold, wind-swept desert floor in 1969 there occurred an event of the profoundest and most singular importance. In retrospect, that morning and the whole of that day assume for me and for vast numbers of Japanese Americans the proportions of a mystical experience, the rebirth of a whole generation of Americans who were wronged by events that took place over a quarter century before.
 - Edison Tomimaro Uno, 1971, in Executive Order 9066: The Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans

In 1972 the California Historical Society opened a landmark photographic exhibition titled Executive Order 9066. At the time, the 1942 government order cited in the exhibition’s title, and the imprisonment of Japanese residents from the West Coast in so-called “internment camps” during World War II, was virtually unknown outside the Japanese community. Within the community, the subject was rarely spoken of—a source of shame and tragedy for the families involved. As the Densho Encyclopedia has observed, with the opening of the exhibition and the publication of its eponymously titled book—part of a resurgence of interest in the topic in the 1970s inside and outside the Japanese American community—the era of silence would end.

Friday, November 20, 2015

The Golden State and the City of Light


France and California have a long and historic relationship, which began in the 18th century when French artist Gaspard Duche de Vancy traveled to California by sea, later painting the landscape of the future state in 1786.  In 1832 Jean-Louis Vignes purchased 104 acres of land between the Los Angeles Pueblo and the Los Angeles River, where he established a successful vineyard, becoming California’s first commercial winemaker.  In the mid-1840s the first French Consulate was established in Monterey.

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Type Tuesday - La Fondografica


Today we feature type from an international type foundry - La Fondografica, from Torino, Italy. 





Jaime Henderson
Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

Monday, November 16, 2015

Dashing Dungeness Dreams


The delayed start of crab season in the San Francisco Bay Area due to toxins from an algae bloom has denizens of the delicious Dungeness near tears. Late fall crab feeds are practically part of the DNA of many northern Californians.

Friday, November 13, 2015

An Ode to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge

Construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge [East from Yerba Buena Island, ca. 1934-35], photographed by Ted Huggins, courtesy, California Historical Society, CHS 2011.737
On the evening of November 14, 1936, in celebration of the opening of the new Bay Bridge, a grand parade was held on Market Street, complete with a “history of bridges” theme. Everything from “man’s first bridge” to Paris’ Pont Neuf was featured in the cavalcade. To have finally linked the East Bay with San Francisco was a momentous occasion, to be sure.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Type Tuesday - Des Buch Druckers Schatz Kästlein

Today we showcase Des Buch Druckers Schatz Kästlein, published by Bauerschen Gisserci  (also known as the Bauer Type Foundry) in 1928. 




















Jaime Henderson,
Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

Monday, November 9, 2015

The “Nibbling Arts” at San Francisco’s 1915 World’s Fair

Postcard, Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915
California Historical Society, CHS2014.1791
The following account was written by fair historian Laura A. Ackley and is excerpted from her book San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkeley: Heyday/California Historical Society, 2014). San Francisco’s Jewel City is a companion publication to the California Historical Society’s exhibition City Rising: San Francisco and the 1915 World’s Fair and winner of the California Book Award, Gold Medal for Californiana.

THE PALACE OF FOOD PRODUCTS

Described as the “temple of the tin can and the food package,” the Palace of Food Products truly could have been nicknamed the “Castle of Cuisine,” the “Stronghold of Sustenance,” or, as a local humorist dubbed it, the “Palace of Nibbling Arts.” Patrons crowded the booths where they could fill up on a variety of free samples, many produced on-site. One young lady wrote to her grandmother, “There are all sorts of demonstrations of jello, shredded wheat, canned fish, crackers, and so on, so that if you had patience enough to wait for the talk and then nibble a thimbleful of food, you really could get quite a meal in time.” (1)

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Carl Haber's Genius








On Thursday, December 5, physicist Carl Haber will visit the California Historical Society for the organization's final program in its 'Historic Techniques' series. And the series couldn't end on a higher note than by featuring Haber, a MacArthur 'Genius' award winner for his IRENE/3D project.

Last week, KQED discussed his work restoring the sounds of Native Americans in California.

Below is an excerpt from a piece by Haber in Physics Today that discusses his unique approach to his work.

With the help of techniques first used by particle physicists decades ago, scientists and archivists are preserving our precious aural heritage. Historic sound recordings of the late-19th and early-20th centuries represent a small but diverse snapshot of the world, taken as a great transition was under way. The age of information technology was arriving, and at the same time, traditional experiences and ways of life were being displaced, transformed, or eliminated. In the research sphere, first-generation anthropologists, linguists, and ethnographers—among the earliest researchers to adopt sound recording as a tool for scientific fieldwork—captured bits of that global transition. Instrumental and vocal performances that earlier could only be experienced live—in a theater, a church, a parlor, or by a campfire—could now be experienced over and over; the result was a huge increase in the appreciation and creation of musical and related performing arts. The heroic inventors of recording technology left us their experimental recordings, their apparatus, and their notes, documenting their creative process and the emergence of a modern technology. Early recorded sound is consequently a world treasure.
Nowadays most recorded sound is stored on digital media, but initially sound was stored analogously on a great variety of materials, including foil, lacquer, metal, paper, plastic, shellac, and wax, and in photosensitive emulsion. Recording formats included a variety of undulating grooves, latent images, and polarizations. Also wide ranging are the forms of degradation and damage, including abrasion, breakage, chemical decomposition, delamination, dirt, fading, mold, overplaying, oxidation, peeling, and warping.
The preservation and restoration of sound recordings must deal with all the factors described above and, not surprisingly, presents unique challenges. Several of us at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working in close collaboration with the Library of Congress and others, have studied the problem and developed some solutions. The work described in this Quick Study has allowed researchers and the public to listen to a variety of “unplayable” key historical documents. Still, many media and modes exist that remain to be addressed, and our work is far from done.
 To learn more about Haber and his work, register for the CHS event, HERE.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Type Tuesday - Miller and Richard's Le Naudin series



Today we showcase Le Naudin series from the letter foundry of Miller & Richard. 







Jaime Henderson
Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

Monday, November 2, 2015

Yes, Virginia, We Have Another Election Coming Up


First Women to Vote in California, 1912; California Historical Society, CHS2011.559
After a long battle, California finally granted women the right to vote in state elections in October 1911. In this photograph, three of the first women in the state to vote cast their ballots at a poll booth in March 1912. It was not until 1920, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, that the national fight for women’s suffrage ended. Even then, women were slow to acquire the voting habit, taking about 60 years to equal or exceed the number of male voters casting ballots, according to the Pew Research.   
By Steve Swatt

Voters in many parts of California face another Election Day on November 3 that few are aware of and in which even fewer will participate. We won’t be electing a president or governor, but voters throughout California will be deciding local, nonpartisan issues—such as mayor and sheriff in San Francisco, school board members in Palos Verdes and El Segundo, and local taxes in Hermosa Beach and South Pasadena.