Winnipeg, Canada
The great Canadian educator, philosopher, scholar, literary critic, rhetorician, and communication theorist Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born 100 years ago today, in Edmonton—though he grew up and studied here in the ‘Peg before moving on to Cambridge, Windsor, Toronto… and the world stage. McLuhan was a man of idioms and idiosyncrasies, deeply intelligent, and a soothsayer… learn more about him here.
Anyone who follows this blog knows that I quote McLuhan regularly (almost an understatement)… as you can witness here. I regret that I never got to meet him in person, though I did become acquainted with one of his daughters and her husband some years ago…
Thanks for all you left us to ponder, Marshall!
Image: one of a special set of Millennium stamps issued by Canada Post.
Sounds like fun… whatever it means. (-:
(original image source unknown)
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
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On a good day, the monkey rides the goat.
On a bad day, the goat rides the monkey…
Zermatt, Switzerland
The first ascent of the iconic Matterhorn (yes, the one on the triangular-shaped Toblerone chocolate package) was made by Edward Whymper, Lord Francis Douglas, Charles Hudson, Douglas Hadow, Michel Croz, and the two Zermatt guides, Peter Taugwalder father and son on 14 July 1865. Douglas, Hudson, Hadow and Croz were killed on the descent when Hadow slipped and pulled the other three with him down the north face. Whymper and the Taugwalder guides, who survived, were later accused of having cut the rope below to ensure that they were not dragged down with the others, but the subsequent inquiry found no proof of this and they were acquitted.
The Matterhorn accident was long discussed in the media, in Switzerland and abroad… newspapers all over the world reported the tragedy and no other Alpine event has ever caused more headlines. Read the full background to this memorable event in mountaineering history here.
Matterhorn photo (cropped) by Juan Rubiano; Illustrations of Whymper et al’s ascent and disastrous descent are by Gustave Doré.
“A single slip,
or a single false step,
has been the sole cause
of this frightful calamity.”
—Edward Whymper
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Some fun experiments in lid-design from Good, an agency in Kazakshstan (see more here).
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In the history of twentieth-century fashion and portrait photography, Horst’s contribution figures as one of the most artistically significant and long lasting, spanning as it did the sixty years between 1931 and 1991. During this period, his name became legendary as a one-word photographic byline, and his photographs came to be seen as synonymous with the creation of images of elegance, style and rarefied glamour.
Born on 14 August 1906 in Weißenfels-an-der-Saale, Germany, Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann was the second son of a prosperous middle class Protestant shop owner, Max Bohrmann and his wife, Klara Schoenbrodt.
The first pictures that carried a Horst credit line appeared in the December 1931 issue of French Vogue. It was a full-page advertisement showing a model in black velvet holding a Klytia scent bottle in one hand with the other hand raised elegantly above it… Horst’s real breakthrough as a published fashion and portrait photographer was in the pages of British Vogue… starting with the 30 March 1932 issue showing three fashion studies and a full-page portrait of the daughter of Sir James Dunn, the art patron and supporter of Surrealism…
(Learn more about Horst here, and view a collection of selected works here).
