inkbluesky

paris statue and river at night

paris at night part II. update - just thought I’d add the companion photo to the other one. Both are wallpaper size.

Today’s visuals aren’t just the usual esoteric companion of the rest of the post. If you scaled it down to a three by five inch piece of cardboard it would make a nice postcard, The Picture Postcard as Souvenir and Collectible, Exchange and Ritual Communication

The popularity of the picture postcard rose steadily through the 1890s, as appearance, colors, and printing techniques improved. From the turn of the century, the number of dispatched cards exploded. Europe was virtually flooded with picture postcards; metaphors like “an inundation” and “the letting out of waters” were used by the press, as well as terms like “influenza” and “pest.” In 1903, a British paper predicted that within ten years Europe would be buried beneath postcards, as a result of the new “postcard cult.” That year around 600 million postcards were dispatched in Great Britain alone. In Germany the number exceeded one billion, and the same quantity is reported from the USA. Japan lagged a bit behind, with only half a billion.

Postcards the Web 2.0 of the turn of the last century. At least that was my first thought. A new way to communicate - postcards as flickr-blogs-Myspace. Postcards are a template which the writer, like the blogger could customize up to a point and communicate with an audience. There was some resistance at first to postcards and their openness - anyone that came across it could read it - but that social taboo faded after a while.

The card as a means of communication. The driving force behind the postcard, from a postal history point of view, was the need for a practical, cheap, and quick medium for sending short, simple messages. Writing letters was for the élite, not for ordinary people, and for women more than for men.

Phenomenological Analysis of the Natural Attitude of the Body in Modern Ballroom Dance (PDF file)

First, dance is not natural in the sense of social conventions except in the world of musicals from the forties and fifties - try waltzing through the warehouse or office tomorrow - note reactions.

The dance is the confession of the body, in a sense, that it discloses the genetic type (first nature) and the social type (second nature) of the body, the genetic (first nature) and the social individuality (second nature) of the body. It discloses not only the dance that is intended to be danced, but also the natural and/or habitual attitude/s that is/are encapsulated in the archeology of the body.

[ ]… It evokes the conflict between the habitual social type of everyday socially encoded movement and a new social bodily type of a new social dance.

This is the reason that I wonder about the popularity of that dance show on TV especially among families. That the show has been described as wholesome is a denial of its primitive appeal - the presentations are stylized representations of movements that would in slightly different circumstances cause public outrage. On HBO in The Making of Pride and Prejudice ( unfairly labeled a chic flick) the director or one of the actors points out that dances were the only social occasion at which members of the opposite sex were allowed to touch each other. In one telling scene of the movie, Lizzie (Keira Knightley) takes Mr. Darcy’s (Matthew Macfadyen) hand to ascend into a carriage. As Darcy walks they roll the camera in for a close up of his hand as he walks away - the fingers spread slightly - you can see reflected in that moment the exquisite agony of having just touched for a moment the woman with which he was so deeply in love. The only other opportunity for women and men to touch was while dancing at a formal function. A staged event in which the social taboo of such touching was lifted. That social taboo against touching except in those circumstances simply heightened the sexual tension.