A common and disappointing fact of life is products (like all things) inevitably meet their end of life someday. The mark of a great product, are those that transcend their makers.
The chewing gum, Fruit Stripe has been around since 1960. While the gum and brand has changed parent companies several times, the original gum has largely remained the same product since it was introduced. Unfortunately, the gum is now going the way of the do-do.
First, for the uninitiated, Apollo 8 was the first crewed mission to leave Earth’s orbit completely to reach the moon. The crew then orbited the moon some 10 times before returning back to Earth. It was a landmark historical mission.
On December 24, 1968, a few minutes after 10:30 am Houston time, Apollo 8 was coming around from the far side of the Moon for the fourth time. Mission Commander Frank Borman was in the left-hand seat, preparing to turn the spacecraft to a new orientation according to the flight plan. Navigator Jim Lovell was in the spacecraft’s lower equipment bay, about to make sightings on lunar landmarks with the onboard sextant, and Bill Anders was in the right-hand seat, observing the Moon through his side window, and taking pictures with a Hasselblad still camera, fitted with a 250-mm telephoto lens. Meanwhile, a second Hasselblad with an 80-mm lens was mounted in Borman’s front-facing window, the so-called rendezvous window, photographing the Moon on an automatic timer: a new picture every twenty seconds. These photographs, matched with LRO’s high-resolution terrain maps, show that Borman was still turning Apollo 8 when the Earth appeared. It was only because of the timing of this rotation that the Earthrise, which had happened on Apollo 8’s three previous orbits, but was unseen by the astronauts, now came into view in Bill Anders’s side window. Here’s what it looked like, as recreated from LRO data by Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio. You’ll hear the astronauts’ voices as captured by Apollo 8’s onboard tape recorder, beginning with Frank Borman announcing the start of the roll maneuver, and you’ll see the rising Earth move from one window to another as Apollo 8 turns.
Borman: All right, we’re gonna roll. Ready… Set…
Anders: The impact crater with uh – at uh – just prior to the subsolar point on the south side, in the floor of it, uh, [unintelligible], there is one dark hole. But I couldn’t get a quick enough look at it to see if it might be anything volcanic.
Anders: Oh my God, look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth comin’ up. Wow, is that pretty!
Borman: Hey don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.
[shutter click]
Anders: You got a color film, Jim? Hand me a roll of color, quick, would you?
Lovell: Oh man, that’s great.
Anders: Hurry.
Lovell: Where is it?
Anders: Quick
Lovell: Down here?
Anders: Just grab me a color. A color exterior. Hurry up. Got one?
Lovell: Yeah, I’m looking’ for one. C 368.
Anders: Anything. Quick.
Lovell: Here.
Anders: Well, I think we missed it.
Lovell: Hey, I got it right here [in the hatch window].
Anders: Let me get it out this one, it’s a lot clearer.
Lovell: Bill, I got it framed, it’s very clear right here!
[shutter click]
Lovell: Got it?
Anders: Yep.
Lovell: Take several, take several of ’em! Here, give it to me!
Anders: Wait a minute, just let me get the right setting here now, just calm down.
Lovell: Take –
Anders: Calm down, Lovell!
Lovell: Well, I got it right – aw, that’s a beautiful shot…Two-fifty at f/11.
I love this interaction. It highlights just how much a team effort it took to take these photographs, and just how astounding the visage of Earth rising up out of the darkness as they orbited out of the dark side of the moon. Truly captivating.
According to an interview between the Kubrick and Michel Ciment, Kubrick attempted to create this photograph initially using extras. But was unhappy with the result. The photo we now know, was ultimately shopped together. Kubrick literally photographed Jack Nicholson from an approximate high angle shot peering down. Then airbrushed Nicholson into the “picture library” photo Kubrick found. Incredible.
Did you have all those extras pose for the last shot?
“No, they were in a photograph taken in 1921 which we found in a picture library. I originally planned to use extras, but it proved impossible to make them look as good as the people in the photograph. So I very carefully photographed Jack, matching the angle and the lighting of the 1921 photograph, and shooting him from different distances too, so that his face would be larger and smaller on the negative. This allowed the choice of an image size which when enlarged would match the grain structure in the original photograph. The photograph of Jack’s face was then airbrushed into the main photograph, and I think the result looked perfect. Every face around Jack is an archetype of the period.”
You can now pin columns of interest, following, search, likes, saved threads and more on Threads. It bares an uncanny resemblance to the now defunct TweetDeck! It’s pretty neat, and works well as a pretty decent v1 of the feature.
One ardent threads user has taken to calling it Tapestry. Which I must say, is kind of cute! Not sure it will catch on, but I love the name.
This is a virus that ails America. Hoarding money. There needs to be a movement in America that once you hit your number you just start giving it away now. […] This is the challenge, and this is the good problem. But you want to give them enough money such that they can do anything, but not enough money such that they can’t do nothing.
Professor Scott Galloway on the Pivot Podcast
Love this mentality. Life is so rich Scott! For those who are curious, here’s the full video for larger context:
I’m absolutely distraught to learn that the incomparable Scott Wampler has passed. He leaves behind such a vast void. He had a way with words. I loved hearing his perspectives on film, fiction and horror. He was a stalwart in the film community and was the former editor over at Birth.Movies.Death.
He was close with filmmakers, writers, directors and creatives from all walks of life. The man was a bonafide comedian and in recent memory, began reaching new heights with The Kingcast, a podcast that largely covers the works of Stephen King. Guests included Elijah Wood, Guillermo del Toro and of course, Stephen King and more.
Oh man…Scott Wampler was a truly singular force; passionate, hilarious and loved by everyone who knew him. My heart is with his friends and family. What a shocking loss.
I consider Serra to be one of the greatest artists who ever lived.
I was personally inspired by him as a child. It blew my mind comprehending the scale and process of his works. Serra has been a large part of my life growing up. Below, I’ll share two of his pieces from my hometown(s): Dallas and Fort Worth.
He, like so many of his contemporaries, drew upon their own life experience to forge their own path. I mean, Serra himself worked in a steel mill at a very young age. Him and so many other artists cross-pollinated ideas and inspiration with each other. They supplanted the status quo, questioned everything and re-wrote what art meant. They were chasing exaltation, the avant garde artists were simply vibrating.
The years 1957-61 Serra studied at the University of California at Berkeley and at Santa Barbara. To support himself, Serra worked part-time at a steel mill, which was to have a strong influence on his later work. The period 1961-64, he studied painting at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture. During his years at Yale the worked and studied with Philip Guston, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves (his first wife), Frank Stella, and Chuck Close, among others. Supported by fellowships, he spent time in France, where he spent a great deal of time drawing near a reconstruction of Brancusi’s studio and Italy where he began painting a series of grids in random colors. He later learned that Ellsworth Kelly was painting in a similar style, so Serra abandoned the technique. In 1966 he moved to New York. There he met other future Minimalists and Environmental Artists such as: Eva Hesse, Carl Andre,Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Steve Reich, Robert Smithson, and Michael Snow. In New York, he began making his first sculptures out of rubber-said to have been inspired by the horizontal progression in Jackson Pollock’s painting. In 1968 Richard Serra made his piece titled “Splashing” by throwing molten lead in the corner where the floor meets the wall in the warehouse of the art dealer Leo Castelli.
You can look up photos from that Pollock-lead splashing exhibition. Pretty wild stuff. Insane? Yes. Groundbreaking? Yes. Later, his quieter, less chaotic works were forged in some of the biggest foundries in the world. He became more focused on scale. His works became more pensive over time, and less reactionary after the 1970s.
Richard Serra spoke with the Museum of Modern Art about his works and shed some light on his processes (YouTube link here). Briefly, he gave us a bit of wisdom I cherish deeply within my heart of hearts. Touching and feeling is so important. I would argue, it is paramount to the human condition. Interacting with physical art can be restorative:
Now, in this century into virtual reality, where everybody reads images through the virtual. That’s one of the big problems that art confronts right now — in fact, probably we all confront — is that the virtual denies tactility.
It denies your physical presence in relationship to something other than a lighted screen. The nature of art has given way to photographs and images — we receive information through images — that we don’t receive art through our total senses in terms of walking, looking, and experiencing, and touching and feeling. And that’s kind of been lost.
That’s not to say it’s not going to come back.
Don’t deny yourself the feeling or grace he granted us. The next time you experience a work by Serra, you better put both your hands on it.
