Dreaming of Stars

Post by Portraits of Boston.

I’m studying astrophysics.”

“Tell me something about astrophysics that maybe most people don’t think of when they hear the term.”

“Simply, the awareness that the stars are also alive, depending on how you define life. They are breathing, and there is energy inside them that is constantly flowing. For me, it doesn’t matter where I look, at the ground or in the sky, there is life constantly breathing all around me. This life here is great, but I also want to know about that life. Something more exists outside the human realm or condition.”

“Do you have any 

other interests outside astrophysics?”

“Poetry.”

“Interesting. The way you spoke of the stars was quite poetic, too.”

“I feel that poetic expression is the way my brain naturally thinks. The other day I wrote a poem that goes like this: “The baby came too soon / The blood flows through the moon.”

Mondays with Alan: Reincarnation

Rob the Rainbow

This advertisement for Jester Wools, suggesting that their product can make gayer garments, is just far to amusing to not share immediately. 

Historic Cambridge

Here is a view of Cambridge Massachusetts circa 1910. You can find the original here. 

Mondays with Alan: Nature of Selfishness

It's Only a Paper Moon

"It's Only A Paper Moon"

It is only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn't be make believe
If you believed in me

Yes, it's only a canvas sky
Hangin' over a muslin tree
But it wouldn't be make believe
If you believed in me

Without your love
It's a honky tonk parade
Without your love
It's a melody played in a penny arcade

It's a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be
But it wouldn't be make believe
If you believed in me

Without your love
It's a honky tonk parade
Without your love
It's a melody played in a penny arcade

It's a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be
But it wouldn't be make believe
If you believed in me

Images of men on a paper moon keep coming up in my search through vintage images. None of them can be traced back to a specific story, yet all depict a moment of intimacy between men that was witnessed by a camera nearly a century ago. I love them and the hints they give us about the moments people shared together in another era. 

No one seems to know where the paper moon came from. 

The first reference to a paper moon in a failed Broadway play called The Great Magoo. The song, with music written by Harold Arlen with lyrics by E. Y. Harburg and Billy Rose, was eventually used in the 1933 movie Take A Chance. In World War II the song was reprised by Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole. Since that time scores of artists have remade this jazz standard.

It seems however that by the time Ella and Nat were singing It's Only a Paper Moon, the pictures were already started to disappear. Few pictures of World War II era soldiers can be found with this backdrop. The vast majority of the images seem to come from the 1900s into the 1930s. 

Photography became available to the mass market in 1901 when Kodak released the Brownie. Freed from the need to cary around bulky equipment and toxic chemicals, the average person was able to document their experiences in the world for about a dollar (the cost of the first Brownie). In a book called the Artistic Secrets of the Kodak, Austrian architectural critic Joseph August Lux wrote that the inexpensive cameras allowed people to "photograph and document their surroundings and thus produce a type of stability in the ebb and flow of the modern world."

Perhaps the paper moon pictures were an effort to preserve the fleeting moments of joy and pleasure between friends at carnivals, festivals, and parties in turn of the century America?

When Forced Fluids are Indicated