Summer Vacation to the Past

If you’re in the process of planning your summer vacation, and want to go to somewhere few others have visited, travel 5,000 years into the past and visit Caral in Peru. What a glorious sight it would be to witness sunrise over the ruins!

At Caral you’ll find an ancient urban center with pyramid temples, sunken plaza, an amphitheater, and a complex of housing foundations. This was a city in the New World that could rival those of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. The discovery of this 163-acre city shocked archaeologists because it was dated 1500 years earlier than they ever expected. Elaborate rituals were performed atop the city’s red, yellow and white pyramids with priests moving up the steep stairways that narrowed as they approached the top. The sound of flutes could be heard, like those excavated in the city’s great amphitheater. What productions may have gone on here? Expertly engineered canals irrigated fields of cotton, chili peppers, pumpkin, squash and sweet potatoes. Extensive trading brought goods from the majestic surrounding mountains and the sea. Different neighborhoods reveal the houses of farmers, traders, artisans and elites in a well-planned city complex. Amazingly, no evidence of warfare or domination has yet to be found. Could this be the rare Utopia we’ve sought for centuries with no success?

A journey to Caral reveals archaeology at work. Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady and her team are digging through the dust of the centuries and reconstructing ruins hoping to bring an ancient society back to life. Archaeologists and trained local people guide visitors through the site, and the number of tourists has been tripling. More and more information about the startling site is becoming available, and Shady is teaming with the Peruvian government to make Caral and major visitor’s site.

Caral is 120 miles from Lima, and you can rent a car for about $35 per day to travel there on your own. Accommodations in nearby towns range from $12 to $25 per night. For $99 you can go on an all-day tour from your Lima hotel.

The time to go is now before it’s littered with souvenir shacks, and chatting tourists obstruct the awesome sunsets and imagined whispers of ancient flutes.

Early Movies and American Art

It’s exciting to see that there’s a new exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. exploring the connection between early movies and American Art at the time. They’ve juxtaposed monitors playing the earliest films with artwork dating from 1880 — 1910, and show fascinating links between early stop—action photos and paintings by Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast. Hassam and Prendergast were highly influence by Monet’s and Cezanne’s use of color and paint application in small patches and dabs. The brilliance of Impressionist and Post—Impressionist paintings was partly due to the fact that the viewer’s eye blended the dabs of color. Previously, it was common to mix colors on a palette before applying them to the canvas.
By painting with dabs of color next to each other, the artists allowed the viewer’s eye to blend them. Colors became brighter because of “persistence of vision,” when the eye retains an image of the color dab for a brief moment while looking at the next. See how Prendergast used small patches of color in his work “Picnic.”

It is the same persistence of vision that creates the illusion of motion in a moving picture. The individual frames of the movie blend together because of the delay that holds an image of the frame for an instant. This momentary retention of an image, or dab of colored paint, lasts about 1/30th of a second, but that’s enough time to blend the two into a seamless unit that either fools us into seeing continuous movement, or creates the bright flash of a new color.

You can try a few interesting visual experiments to experience your persistence of vision.

Tube—o—vision:
1. Get a cardboard mailing tube about 3 inches wide and 2 feet long. This can be the tube from wrapping paper too.
2. Cut a slit in the closed end that’s 1—1/2 inches long and 1/8 inch wide.
3. Close one eye and look through the open end of the tube. Be sure to block out any light by cupping your hand around the tube and your eye.
4. When you don’t move the tube, you see very little of the outside world. But when you look through the tube as you slowly sweep the tube back and forth, you’ll be surprised at how much of your surroundings you’ll see.
5. As you swing the tube back and forth your eye’s persistence of vision holds the narrow view through the slit for 1/30th of a second, but “pastes” it over the next tiny slit view creating what appears to be a continuous image.

Have A Nice Day:
1. Cut out the two circles. Glue them back to back, but be sure one is upside down.
2. Punch out two small holes.
3. Cut two 8” pieces of string and tie them through the holes.
4. Hold the string about 2” from the circles and spin them to see the message.

The Eames Chair Turned 50!

It’s hard to believe that the Eames Chair is 50 years old! Can it really be? It was first debuted on the Today Show in 1956. That was the era of Doo Wop music, pompadours, poodle skirts and fins on automobiles, yet the Eames chair is still a fashion icon. While few women would wear their poodle skirt anywhere but a 50’s party or costume contest, almost anyone would welcome the elegant, leather upholstered rosewood veneered chair in their home in a minute.

Eames originally designed the chair as a birthday gift for his friend film-maker Billy Wilder so he could comfortably watch TV. Eames said he wanted it to have “the warm receptive look of a well used first baseman’s mitt.” Instructions that come with the chair suggest you clean its soiled leather with a damp, soft cloth lathered with a mild soap and lukewarm water. Sounds just like how I took care of my old mitt. But this birthday gift became one of Eames’ most important designs and is today regarded as an icon of modernism. It is part of the permanent Design Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Ancient Romans Speak---Through Graffiti

Today most people think of graffiti as something to be painted over as soon as it appears, but, perhaps in years to come, it may be a vault of knowledge about our popular culture. This has been the case for Roman graffiti that was scratched into the plaster of pubs, homes, brothels, tombs and workshops. So vital is it for understanding the pop culture of ancient Romans, that over 180,000 such inscriptions have been collected and catalogued in the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of
Sciences and Humanities. The collection is called the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, or “the Corpus,” and researchers throughout what had been the Roman Empire are still copying carvings and engravings from tumbled and recycled stones. Scholars have made remarkable insights into the everyday lives of Rome’s common folk.

So what kind of tidbits were scratched into Ancient Rome’s plaster? Brags about the quality of one’s vinyard; a man’s infatuation with his girlfriend; laments for a dead child, recommendations for certain prostitutes; advertisements for baked goods; prayers from gamblers and gladiators, and curses cast upon thieves.

So next time you’re in a restroom and see the writing on the wall, think about how a researcher in the future may use it to speculate about who we were.