January 2011

Of all the reasons offered, when The Patriot was released last year, for the dearth of films on the American Revolution, the most convincing was the simplest, that there is no satisfying way to present period attitudes toward slavery to a modern audience. Glory , the finest film ever made about the American Civil War, succeeds precisely because it confronts the issue head-on. Whether or not all the men who fought it could articulate it, or even understand it, the war from beginning to end was about slavery. The director Edward Zwick’s 1989 film received some criticism from historians for implying that the 54th Massachusetts Regiment was the first black fighting unit in the Union Army (although the movie does not say this) and for depicting most of the soldiers as former slaves when most in fact were freemen who had grown up in the North. But in this case the rewriting of history was justified. How else to represent fairly not just that regiment but all the 168,000 black soldiers and 30,000 black sailors who fought in Lincoln’s army and navy?

A. Lifelong bird watchers and those who are baffled at the bird feeder will marvel equally at the new Sibley Guide to Birds (Knopf, $35.00). David Alien Sibley has been drawing and painting America’s birds—and preparing to create this volume—since he was seven. In it he shows every species found in the United States and Canada in all its varieties, including juvenile and nonbreeding plumages and in flight. The presentation, as beautiful as it is detailed and informative, sets a dazzling new standard for bird guides and thus for the appreciation of the avian wonders of our continent.

www.artmuseum.net

At the One Stop Warhol Shop you can see Clark Gable’s shoes, given to the footwear-loving Andy Warhol by Gable’s widow; get the answers to questions like “Was Warhol gay?,” “Was he rich?,” “Did he wear a wig?,” and “Did he do drugs?” (yes in all cases) that may seem an insult to the memory of a dead man untii you remember that the dead man is Andy Warhol; and even, should you be interested, look at his art. It’s a cinch that Warhoi, who died in 1987, would have been pleased to see his life and work made accessible by the latest technology, though he might not have liked the fact that he wasn’t making any money from it.

memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html

To evaluate the Imperial Rum, we diluted it with two parts of water, as was done for common seamen in the Royal Navy, and conducted a blind taste test against a leading premium brand of Jamaican rum diluted to the same alcoholic content. Seven of nine staff members preferred the naval rum, which they described as “delicate,” “earthy.” “oaky,” and “dissipates like smoke on the tongue.” The other brand: “mellow, bland, creamy” and “tastes like alcohol and water and the paper cup that holds it.”

Is Royal Navy rum worth $6,000 a gallon? Not on a publishing salary, to be sure. Still, all were impressed with the momentousness of the tasting experience—not just the link with long tradition, but also the fact that each tiny cup held $8 worth of liquor.

Few things are more evocative of the past than bad food. As proof, consider the London restaurant School Dinners, which for 20 years has drawn hordes of enthusiastic customers (including the noted epicure Prince Andrew) who pay good money ” to eat the exact same dreary fare they were subjected to at boarding school. Nothing that bizarre could ever happen in America, if only because most of us can duplicate our high school lunchroom experience by simply visiting the company cafeteria. On the other hand, we do have Civil War re-enactors who enthusiastically pay eight dollars for a box of 10 hardtack crackers—the same crackers that, according to one genuine Union soldier, “required a very strong blow of the fist to break.” The crackers’ manufacturer, the G. H. Bent Company of Milton, Massachusetts ( www.hardtackcracker.com ), was the biggest supplier of hardtack to the Union Army during the Civil War. Around the turn of the century, the company stopped making them, only to revive production a few years ago at the request of re-enactors.

Filmmaking is a difficult job of distillation, but nothing has prepared me for winnowing down nearly 19 hours of film—my new PBS documentary, Jazz —to a single CD. Still, I’ve done it, and of the 20 cuts on the album (released by Columbia/Legacy), these are my absolute favorites.

1. Star Dust, Louis Armstrong, 1931.

Armstrong is to music in the twentieth century what Einstein is to physics and the Wright brothers are to travel: the most important person there was. He liberated jazz, taking it from being an ensemble music to a soloist art, with his horn and his voice. I think this masterpiece of virtuoso singing and playing is the best way to start any consideration of jazz.

Armstrong at the height of his powers transforms W. C. Handy’s familiar standard into a virile, driving, utterly dramatic showcase for his trumpet genius.

3. The Mooche, Duke Ellington, 1928.

Book: Calendar Clocks by Tran Duy Ly (Arlington Books Company, 1993). Picture eccyclopedia with an update price guide. Museum: The American Clock & Watch Museum, 100 Maple Street, Bristol. CT 06010 (860-583-6070). Web site: members.rurlnet.org/calender.htm. Oranization: national Association of Watch & Clock Collectors, 514 Poplar Street, Columbia, PA 17512.

Analyzing the new, disconcertingly off-kilter five-dollar bill last summer, a New York plastic surgeon somehow convinced Newsweek that the government had merely given Lincoln a face-lift to modernize the old portrait. Not so. The portrait on the new bills is in fact modeled after an entirely different photograph of Lincoln—but one taken at the very same sitting. And behind the two portraits lies a story that illuminates the art of presidential image-making.

Starting around 1865, clocks told not only the time but the day, the date, and even the month. The calendar clock had been a mechanical possibility for centuries, but in America after the Civil War, it took hold, and inventors peppered the Patent Office with improvements. With one dial or two separate ones, it was a gadget suited to the age, equally popular in schools, offices, and front parlors. A Connecticut inventor named Daniel J. Gale patented clocks that kept track of the number of years until the next leap year, the week number (out of 52), the moon phase, and the sunrise/sunset times on a latitude he described only as “New England.”

After 1915 the craze for calendar clocks of all types faded, just as quickly as it had once taken hold. By the end of the 1920s, almost none were being manufactured in the United States.

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