Couperin record label art

 Les nations - Editions de l'oiseau-lyre SOL.60014 [1960]

 Les nations - Telefunken AWT 9476-A [1968]

Chamber music of François Couperin, Titanic Ti-39 [1978]

One of the vicarious pleasures of enjoying phono discs is appreciating the record label design. Throughout the history of recorded sound, the companies that release records have created trademarked identities for their products.  Unfortunately, there does not appear to be reference book that thoroughly documents this practice.  The Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound does include several black and white examples.

We still maintain a collection of several thousand long playing records.  Recordings of music by François Couperin, a French baroque composer and keyboard player, show us some striking examples of this artwork.  Baroque classical music is regarded as a refined art form and it has been released by some of the finer classical record labels.

The L'oiseau lyre logo features the distinctive lyre birds in profile as bookends.  The word Telefunken is of German coinage and is made up of the prefix "tele" (far-off) and "funken" meaning sparks.  Their logo features multiply symmetrical electrical bolts surrounding the brand name broken into three syllables inside a diamond.  Titanic is an American label that has specialized in baroque music.  The feature the eponymous ocean liner on their label art.

Our collection of long playing records is available to borrow from the Library.


Chamber Music of François Couperin (Titanic Records, p1978).

Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound by Frank Hoffmann, editor (Routledge, 2005).

Les nations / François Couperin (Oiseau-Lyre, 1960)

Les Nations: 1726 / François Couperin (Telefunken, 1969).

Mecca for Musicians - One Hundred Years ago at the Main Library

Upstairs there is a happy hunting-ground for the musicians in the form of a well-stocked music-room. Should any poverty stricken member of the long-haired gentry feel the lure of Beethoven, Brahms, Bach or Bizet, he needs but drift in, select the favored work and give it a tryout in the sound-proof room attached.  Here may the Terpsichorean muse be wooed in every guise but a ragged one. For rag of every sort is taboo, and the vigilant ear of the music librarian is ever cocked for the forbidden strains from the music-room.  In other words, "Nix on the rag in the library."

source: "San Francisco Now Has Library To Be Proud Of," San Francisco Chronicle (February 25, 1917), 34.

San Francisco Public Library Monthly Bulletin vol. 23, no. 1 (January-April 1917), 2

"May this structure throned on imperishable books, be maintained and cherished from generation to generation for the improvement and delight of mankind" source: Public Library Building: Erected Nineteen Hundred and Sixteen; Description of building / George W. Kelham ([San Francisco: s.n., 1917?]).

February 15 was the 100th birthday of the 1917 opening of the San Francisco Public Library Main Library building.

One of the highlights of the newly opened building was a Music Department on the 3rd floor (later the home of the San Francisco History Room). This was one of the only specialized departments in the new building.  The new service was housed in a beautiful room with wood paneling. This new service merited attention in the San Francisco Chronicle article quoted above.

The patron-base of this "mecca for musicians" was thought to be "long-haired gentry."  Starting around the 1910s, classical music began to be semi-pejoratively known in America as "long hair music." In this article, classically trained musicians are further ridiculed as both "poverty-stricken" and "gentry."  The author is also mistaken when invoking Terpsichore, the Greek muse of dance, when discussing music making.

At the building's opening, the department could support the luxury of providing a piano in a sound-proof for musicians wanting to try out a score from the collection.  While this article makes a big deal of the prohibition of ragtime, the music librarians of the San Francisco Public Library have always been very catholic in their selection of musical genres and at no time did they neglect ragtime in their collection building.

The back wall in the photograph below features covered bins for the so-called "x-class sheet music."  In this method of shelving, chamber music was laid flat in bins organized by ensemble type.

The San Francisco Public Library became an innovator when it provided specialized service to the musicians of the community.  Our efforts at collecting music and documenting our City's musical history predate almost all most universities.  The collection was built to a very high level by the first music librarian, the exceptionally capable and energetic Jessica Fredricks, who worked at the library from 1916 to 1951.

A photograph of the Music Department [no date] 

Music Department (source: San Francisco Historical Photograph collection)

Interior of Main Library - music room, looking toward technical room (source: San Francisco Historical Photograph collection)

The x-class sheet music after the collection moved to the 1st floor (source: San Francisco Historical Photograph collection)

A Wealth Of International Film Periodicals

Advertisement for Purab Aur Pacchhim (East and West), from Film World (March 1971)

During a recent revisit to SFPL's film magazine collection, both current and ceased publicatons, I was again made aware of the wealth of film literature about world cinema that lies within our reach. Titles such as FilmKritik (German), Cinema (French), Cinema Nuovo (Italian), Cine Cubano (Spanish), and Film World (English/India) allow us an important look into the cinematic world that co-exists with mainstream American cinema.

Having grown up myself watching Indian Hindi cinema or Pakistani Urdu cinema (Urdu and Hindi are two names of the same language), I really appreciated discovering the periodical Film World. Though it is primarily dedicated to Hindi cinema, it gives ample space to Indian films being made in other Indian languages such as Bengali, Tamil and Malayalam. One can also find articles about international cinema.

For example, if one were to request the bound volume 7 of Film World from storage, one would find in the Feb – March 1971 issue a detailed article on a production boom in India, a detailed write up on the first screen lady of Indian cinema Devika Rani, and successes of superstar Rajesh Khanna and Akkineni Nageswara Rao. This issue also has an article on the great French new wave director Jean Renoir and his definition of cinema verite, and a couple of pages dedicated to American cinema in an article entitled "Revolution in American Cinema" that discusses works like Five Easy Pieces, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider.

In other issues, I found many insightful critiques of leading Hindi filmmakers, actors and their films.  The film posters and advertising from that time are delightful and offer a rare window to a people’s past. With the rising interest in what is known in the west as Bollywood, Film World and a later periodical Cinema Vision India can be of tremendous historical and cultural value to those who are intrigued by Indian films.


Bibliography:

Film World (Bombay, India) (T.M. Ramachandran, 1961-). [San Francisco Public Library has 1971-1978]

Cinema Vision India ([Bombay] : S. Kak).  [San Francisco Public Library has 1980-1983]

art-SITES san francisco

When and how does a reference book become obsolete?

The clearest answer to the question is when the information in it is no longer accurate or is superseded, and more critically, if the inaccuracies in the reference could lead to misinformation or harm.

Often travel guides fall into this category -- hotels, restaurants or attractions may open or close, the prices for attractions and accomodations may have changed.  Yet for the locale written about, obsolete travel guides provide a historic perspective and may even reveal unseen features of a place to the reader.

In San Francisco we are fortunate to have many guides for those interested in the arts.  Even some of the oldest ones remain important, if for no other reason, than they show the persistence of objects, buildings, and institutions over time.

art-SITES: san francisco: The Indispensible Guide to Contemporary Art-Architecture-Design was published almost 15 years ago.  Obviously there have been many changes to the San Francisco Bay Area's cultural landscape over that decade and a half.  Nevertheless, this reference book still opens up locations for artistic exploration that might escape the attention of many of us.

Organized geographically, San Francisco itself takes up about 70 percent of the book's pages.  And those pages are devoted to the usual districts and neighborhoods -- Union Square, Civic Center, SOMA, the Financial District, Pacific Heights / The Presidio and Golden Gate Park. However, this is one of the few books to look at any of the site-specific art work at the San Francisco International Airport.  It also includes the public art in and around the, then newly constructed, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  Even more helpfully, it details some of the artwork concealed to many of us in hotels and office buildings.

Many of the Geary Street art galleries are listed and described, detailing the artists they represented.  Of course, in the intervening years many of these art galleries have succumbed to market forces and had to close or to move to lower rent districts.  art-SITES: San Francisco does capture that moment for those of us who want to remember that scene.  Imagine the value of this information for someone creating a novel or a film about San Francisco in the 1990s?

Another way this book works as a time capsule is by documenting some of the street art of that moment.  The Luggage Store Gallery gets a nod along with two works of art by a pair of Mission School painters who exhibited there - the husband and wife team of Barry McGee and, our late San Francisco Public Library colleague, Margaret Kilgallen.  Both of these art-works were painted on the building's roll-down security doors at 1007 Market Street.


 "Untitled" by Margaret Kilgallen

"Untitled" by Barry McGee

Both of these works are still documented on the Luggage Store Gallery's webpage.  But a book like this tells us when the works were there and what they meant at that time.  Google Street View only came later and gives us a different view:

1007 Market Street captured in Google Street View February 2014

art-SITES san francisco also has short chapters on the South Bay, the East Bay, Marin County and Napa and Sonoma Counties.  In the chapter on the South Bay I came across art and architecture at Stanford that I was unaware.  On the campus there works of sculpture by Mark Di Suvero, Andy Goldsworthy and Maya Lin.  Additionally I learned about two university buildings designed by James Ingo Freed, the architect for the  San Francisco Public Library's Main Library.

This reference opens with a directory of entry types -- museums, exhibition and performance spaces, galleries, public art, film centers, architecture, architects, urban planning, parks, gardens, plazas, design and bookstores.  It concludes with an index of people, buildings and places.

art-SITES san francisco remains a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding and exploring the culture of the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Most Requested Art, Music and Recreation Center books in January 2017

The top three titles on our current list match well with the nonfiction bestsellers listed in last Sunday's Chronicle.  In the Bay Area, Born a Crime ranks at number 6 and The Princess Diarist ranks at number 4.  Bruce Springsteen's memoir ranks number 3 nation-wide.

Books on hollywood, show business and entertainment in general often do well on the lists of holds.  Memoirs by Anna Kendrick, Lauren Graham, Megyn Kelly as well as the oral history of the Daily Show are all very popular.  In past lists rock and pop music memoirs have also faired well, but only Born to Run and Robbie Robertson's Testimony place on this list.

One slightly surprising title is Walking Through Walls by Marina Abramović.  While Abramović has achieved great renown in performance art circles, she seems out of place among the celebrities of this list.  But, I think the book's popularity reflects San Francisco's readers who have also shown favor towards two books about fine art - How To See by David Salle and a History of Pictures by David Hockney.

Sex sells - even sex from 80 years as Mary Astor's Purple Diary shows.  And anything with the Murakami touch will do well with our readers as can be seen with his book of conversations about music with Seiji Ozawa.

If these books excite you as well, you may have get in line to read them.  Thankfully, the majority of the titles are also available in eBook formats.

Happy reading.


1. Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah (Spiegel & Grau, 2016).

2. The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher (Blue Rider Press, 2016).

3. Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen (Simon & Schuster, 2016).

4. Scrappy Little Nobody by Anna Kendrick (Touchstone, 2016).

5. Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls, (And Everything In Between) by Lauren Graham (Ballantine Books, 2016).

6. Settle For More by Megyn Kelly (Harper, 2016)

7. The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History As Told By Jon Stewart, The Correspondents, Staff and Guests by Chris Smith (Grand Central Publishing, 2016).

8. The Godfather Notebook by Francis Ford Coppola (Regan Arts, 2016).

9. Kathy Griffin's Celebrity Run-Ins: My A-Z Index by Kathy Griffin (Flatiron Books, 2016).

10. Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 by Edward Sorel (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2016).

11. Testimony by Robbie Robertson (Crown Archetype, 2016).

12. Superficial: More Adventures From the Andy Cohen Diaries by Andy Cohen (Henry Holt and Company, 2016).

13. The Magnolia Story by Chip & Joanna Gaines, with Mark Dagostino (W Publishing, , 2016).

14. Walk Through Walls: A Memoir by Marina Abramović, with James Kaplan (Crown Archetype, 2016).

15. How To See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art by David Salle (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016)

16. Absolutely On Music: Conversations by Haruki Murakami with Seiji Ozawa, translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016).

17. Celebrate Everything!: Fun Ideas to Bring Your Parties To Life, written and illustrated by Darcy Miller (William Morrow, 2016).

18. Harry Potter: The Artifact Vault, written by Jody Revenson (Harper Design, 2016).

19. A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen by David Hockney & Martin Gayford (Abrams, 2016).

20. Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson (Riverhead Books, 2016).

Longhair Outgrosses Baseball - a headline from the Variety Golden Jubilee issue

 

Longhair Outgrosses Baseball 

----------------------

Classics, Now a $50,000,000 Boxoffice Bonanza As Against

The National Pastime's $40,000,000 Per Annum -- Symph,

Opera and Ballet Big Middlebrow Draw

This a headline for a Arthur Bronson article on page 467 in the January 4, 1956 special 50th anniversary issue of Variety Magazine.  

The Variety Anniversary Issue was an annual love letter between the entertainment press embodied by Variety Magazine, the primary trade journal for the entertainment industry, and all the people in the entertainment industry who benefited from the magazine's knowledge and reach.  The opening pages of the Golden Jubilee issue are filled with individual full page advertisements taken out by all of the top Hollywood studio executives congratulating the magazine on its longevity.  There are hundreds of other sponsored notes of congratulations from entertainers and corporations throughout this 512 page issue.

The entertainment industry for Variety comprises every sort of performing art, with an emphasis on those that make lots of money.  But the fine arts did have a place within its pages where it was (one hopes affectionately) known as "longhair."  The article below the headline above notes that in 1956 the "boxoffice" for classical music, ballet, opera put together exceeded that of baseball - that certainly gets the reader to stand up and notice.  It goes on to note the importance of the arts in cultural diplomacy, the amount of money spent on classical long playing records and role of film, radio and television in popularizing the arts.  Variety articles are often full of statistics -- this one notes that in 1940, 1,000 American towns offered concert series.  By 1956 the number had risen to 2,600, certainly suggesting a growing interest in classical music.

The Anniversary Issue is full of lists and sidebars.  One includes a list of "actors who have played actors."  There is another list of "remakes of feature films" (by 1956 there had been 3 major releases of both Anna Karenina and Moby Dick).  Gone With The Wind was at the top of the "all-time top money films," but who would have guessed The Robe would come in at number two?  (Adjusted for inflation, Gone With The Wind is still the top grosser).

There is also a chronological chart "50 years of U.S. musical comedy and operetta" listing all the major shows that opened between 1905 and 1956.   Later in the issue there is a table of "Broadway production statistics." This shows the Broadway peaked in 1927-28 with 264 productions throughout the season. It was only natural that the number of productions would taper off owing to the introduction of sound motion pictures and the Great Depression.

Just a year and a half after the Army-McCarthy hearings, this issue has an article entitled "Were You Ever Blacklisted?" subtitled "Variety was - many times, but found friends and special issues kept it going."  This article has a table listing a "chronology of special issues" in Variety magazine over the years.

KRON-TV (the NBC and San Francisco Chronicle affiliate) is among the advertisers, touting a potential 4 million viewer audience and $5,158,223,000 in sales in 1954 (that figure must be for the entire Bay Area).  An advertisement for "The Seven Ashtons," an acrobatic act from Australia notes that they were then performing at Bimbos in San Francisco.

Then there is this provocative headline:

Burlesque -- Its Rise and Demise

-----------------------

Offshoot of Minstrelsy and Extravaganza, Cradle

Of Comedians, Once a Family Amusement, Burlesque

Succumbed to Smut and Strippers

 While today there is a resurgence of interest, in 1956 Burlesque was thought to be on its deathbed.  The article is written by the then 86 year old Barney Gerard, a long time practitioner of the art.  (I cannot find a good biography of Gerard, but he has a number of credits in the Internet Movie Database and a Google Books search brings up myriad articles that show his deep involvement in vaudeville and burlesque).  His article traces the "rise and demise in 60 years" of burlesque.  He many stories including an explanation of the origin of the "hook" used to pull performers who were bombing off the stage.  He even devotes a couple paragraphs to the scene in San Francisco with the Bella Union concert hall in the late 1800s and the Belvedere on O'Farrell Street around the time of the 1906 earthquake.  In the end he laments that burlesque was "strip-teased into oblivion."

As far as I can tell these annual issues have not yet been indexed or scanned online, so they remain a little-known but fascinating on entertainment in all of its forms.  The Library own issues of this annual from 1956 through 1989. 

Variety. Anniversary Edition (Variety, Inc., [1956]-1983).

 Variety. Show Business Annual (Variety, Inc., c1984-1989).

Feminist Film Theory

I recently checked out Feminist Film Theory and Cleo from 5 to 7 written by Hilary Neroni and enjoyed it thoroughly. Being a fan of the French New Wave cinema movement and movies by directors involved indirectly with the Wave, I had never managed to watch a film by Agnes Varda, who was a part of the Rive Gauche (Left Bank) movement along with Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. Reading the book became the impetus to watch Cleo from 5 to 7 directed by Agnes Varda in 1962. In a refreshing approach and a jargon free language Neroni walks the reader through the arc of feminist film criticism and theory, and then having done so, employs Varda’s classic film examining how a (feminist) female oriented movie operates.

The book informs the reader that feminist film criticism was initially inspired by the second wave of feminism and postcolonial theory. Neroni talks about the influence of Freud and Lacan and conditions under which Laura Mulvey wrote her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1973 analyzing the “male gaze” and objectification of the female body in classic Hollywood cinema. Later theoreticians criticized Mulvey for only relying on a Eurocentric and heterosexual lens(es). For example, bell hooks, the African American academic, pointed out that black women viewed those films with an “oppositional gaze” instead of identifying with the white male gaze. Other theoreticians asserted, also, that viewers were capable of a “dialectical gaze” and may assert bisexual desires. Lesbian desire and gaze, too, complicate male/female power paradigm. Issues of race, class, and sexual preference have also been layered upon Laura Mulvey’s initial thesis. 

San Francisco Public Library has a very good collection of books on film criticism and feminist film criticism. Interested patrons can also do a Subject search under: Homosexuality in motion picture. In recent times, Queer theory has also gained prominence when understanding the issue of “male gaze”.

For basic reading, we recommend the following titles:

Feminist film theory and Cléo from 5 to 7 / Hilary Neroni

Feminist film theorists : Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed / Shohini Chaudhuri

Chick flicks : theories and memories of the feminist film movement / B. Ruby Rich

Theory of the image : capitalism, contemporary film, and women / Ann Kibbey

The Routledge encyclopedia of film theory / edited by Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland

Paris is burning : a queer film classic / Lucas Hilderbrand

Framed : lesbians, feminists, and media culture / Judith Mayne

Postcolonial theory and Avatar / Gautam Basu Thakur