Ballast Quarterly Review, V17n1, Autumn 2001

University of Northern Iowa UNI ScholarWorks Ballast Quarterly Review Fall 2001 Ballast Quarterly Review, v17n1, Autumn 2001 Roy R. Behrens University of Northern Iowa, [email protected] Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy Copyright ©2001 Roy R. Behrens Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ballast Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Behrens, Roy R., "Ballast Quarterly Review, v17n1, Autumn 2001" (2001). Ballast Quarterly Review. 64. https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ballast/64 This Periodical is brought to you for free and open access by UNI ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Ballast Quarterly Review by an authorized administrator of UNI ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BALLAST 0 U A R Ballast Quarterly Review Volume 17 Number I Fall 200 I. Copyright © 200 I by Roy R. Behrens, editor, publisher and art director. ISSN I 093-5789. E-mail <[email protected]>. Ballast is an acronym for Books Art Language Logic Ambiguity Science and Teaching, as well as a distant allusion to Blast , the short-lived publication founded during World War I by Wyndham Lewis, the Vorticist artist and writer. Ballast is mainly a pastiche of astonish RANDALL ing passages from books, magazines, diaries JARRELL and other writings. Put differently, it is a jour Art is long, and nal devoted to wit, the contents of which are critics are the intended to be insightful, amusing o r thought insects of a day. provoking. The purposes of Ballast are educational, apo ANON litical and noncommercial. It does not carry 'Tis better to advertisements, nor is it supposed to be pur have loved a chased or sold. It is published approximately short than every three months, beginning in the fall never to have (more or less) and ending in the summer. loved a tall. To subscribe to Ballast or to order a gift sub scription, simply send in a mailing address and HENNY five first class U.S. postage stamps for each YOUNGMAN single issue desired. In other words, to (after watching receive Ballast for one year (four issues), we ballerinas danc ask that each reader contribute a total of ing on tiptoe): twenty genuine unused postage stamps. Do Why don't they not send postage meter slips, nor do we just get taller accept orders by phone or e-mail. When sub girls? scribing, self-adhesive stamps are preferred. Short of that, send good-looking, antique or unusual stamps. In general we do not accept requests from outside the U.S. A few hours after I arrived at Taliesin we dined with oth ers outside under a large tree. Flies, for some reason, were prolific on this warm spring day. [The architect Frank Lloyd] Wright remedied this annoyance by having a fly swatter next to his chair. As a fly landed, he would pick up the swatter and take precise aim . "That's Gropius," he jovially exclaimed, and then he would take aim again at another unsuspecting fly. "And that's Corbusier, " he would add, until dead flies littered the table and he had struck down the so -called hierarchy of modern architec ture. MAR I A STONE in Edgar Tafel, ed., About Wright: An Album of Recollections Those Who Knew Fronk Lloyd Wright (New York: John Wiley. 1993). p. 57. T R y R V w a FRA, DARD AND MARY MERRYSEAT: O n Elb e rt Hubbard and Dard Hunter Copyright© 200 I by Roy R. Behrens ANON Ars longa, vita brevis. LEFT Photograph of ELBERT HUB BA RD as published In Pig-Pen Pete or Some Chum s o( Mine (East Au rora NY: Roycrolt, 191 •) . Author's collection. IN 1903 . A 20-YEAR-OLD chalk talk artist named William J. Hunter (later known as Oard Hunter) was touring the U.S. on the Chautauqua lecture circuit. The son of an FINLEY Ohio newspaper publisher, he was the stage PETER assistant for a troupe of traveling magicians. DUNNE headed by his brother Phil , who performed as lvry gr-reat ora "The Buckeye Wizard." tor ought to be On a hot summer day in California. the accompanied by chalk talk and the magic show had been an orchesthry or, scheduled to follow a lecture by the politician at worst, a William Jennings Bryan-the "Silver-Tongued pianist who wud Orator"- who had recently lost a bid for the play trills while U.S. Presidency. To prepare the stage for the th' artist was magic show required considerable effort, so refreshin' himsilf all the props had been installed when Bryan arrived for his lecture. Backstage, as he with a glass iv groped for the curtain. he became entangled ice wather. in the magic paraphernalia, and ripped out wires. strings. and threads. Upset by Bryan's clumsiness and his unwill ingness to apologize, Hunter noticed that the orator's hat had been left backstage. During the lecture, he dumped red chalk inside the hat. so that later, when Bryan placed It on his a 8 A L L A T Q U A R perspiring bald head and sauntered out into the blazing sun, he became literally red-faced. It was on that California tour that Hunter stayed briefly at the Glenwood Mission Inn (now called Riverside Inn) in Rivers ide. There. for the second time. he witnessed a new trend in architectural and interior design MAX known as Craftsman or Miss ion style. He had BEERBOHM seen furnishings of this kind two years earlier !William Morris] at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. is unquestion New York, but never before had he been ably an all-round engulfed by it: "You can't imagine how it man, but the act makes me feel to look at it," he wrote to his of walking brother, "It is the grandest thing I've seen round him has since I have been in existence." He couldn't wait to return to Ohio, to build his own Mis always tired me. sion furniture and to redesign the entrance hall to his parents' home. Mission-style furniture was first marketed in the U.S. in 189•. Inspired by William Morris OARD and the British Arts and Crafts Movement, it HUNTER was called "M iss ion" because, like the furnish (My Life ings in monasteries and miss ions , it was non• With Paper) decorative. sturdy, and simple. It was, as !As a child] I was someone noted then. "a furniture with a mis fat and rotund, sion, and that mission is to teach that the first and had a lack laws of furniture making should be good adaisical disposi material, true proportion and honest work tion; a slow and manship." In addition, it may have been influ easy way of life enced by the austerity of Shaker furniture, which was well-known and had been exhibited was more to my at the U.S. Centennial Exhibition in Philadel liking. I recall my phia in 1876. embarrassment Morris had also spearheaded the Private when my father Press Movement by setting up the Kelmscott ordered two Press in 1890. Between I 89S and 1910, more pairs of trousers than SO derivative presses were launched in for me from a the U.S. alone. So it is no surprise that, at the Philadelphia tai same time that Oard Hunter became interest lor. When the ed in Mission-style furniture, his father had enormous pants acquired a book that had been designed and were completed printed by William Morris. "I became so fasci they were dis- nated by the book," Hunter recalled, "and by played in the father's description of the Kelmscott Press clothing-store that I was eager to visit England, where such window with a books had been made." But he could not placard reading: afford to travel then. "For a ten-year In the meantime, Hunter's brother had old Ohio boy." shown him an issue of The Philistine, "a period ical of protest" that was edited by a former soap company executive named Elbert Hub bard. Published by an artists' colony called Roycroft in East Aurora, New York. it was. as one author describes it today, a flamboyant literary magazine full of " ranting. 'new' poetry. distilled aphorisms, and self-promotion." However pretentious. it must have struck a T y R V w 11 common chord, because its circulation grew from 2,000 in 1895 to 52,000 in 1900, then soared to an astonishing total of I I 0,000 by 1902. This phenomenal rise in the magazine's cir culation was triggered in part by an essay, titled "A Message to Garcia," that first appeared in The Philistine in March 1899. and was then reissued in scores of editions as a slim but elegant leather-bound book. A defender of benevolent capitalism, Hubbard compared a worker's obligation to his corpo rate employer to a soldier's unwavering loyal ty to his patriotic duty. According to Eileen Boris (in Art and Labar) , it was Hubbard's belief that "the ordinary worker was incom petent and lazy, but those who loyally fulfill orders would be rewarded. Such men need never fear layoff, and need never strike." It is odd to recall that this essay, which was widely distributed to workers by American corporations, was written by an "artiste" who, in nearly all his photographs, is groomed and costumed in the garb of a nonconformist. Wearing shoulder-length hair (which tended to be thought of then, as it still is , as effemi nate), a wide-brimmed hat, and a flashy bow like Windsor tie, he dressed like a resolute advocate of the Aesthetic Movement, decked out to resemble a " dandy" (or Aesthete) like James A.M .

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