Plain white hotel china
“Hotels and restaurants rely on simple round white plates, “hotel china.” ‘Round and white has been the industry standard for a number of reasons,’ Julie Gustafson wrote in the online magazine Hotel & Motel. ‘White goes with everything, so there’s no need to change dinnerware with the change of carpet and curtains. And chefs love a plain white background to set off their food.’ . . .
Plain white hotel china has also entered the home. . . . It is dishwasher safe, inexpensive, and unobtrusive.”
—Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element, 2005.
opacity and whiteness
“Most paper has 2%–10% ceramic as a so called filler material; some papers have even more. The ceramic is actually a very important active ingredient providing paper with opacity and whiteness, while controlling the flow of ink in writing and printing. Without the ceramic, ink would be absorbed by and smear into the paper. The ceramic also can provide color. Ceramic has been used for many centuries as an important paper additive, with china clays, such as kaolin, having very long histories as the applied a material.”
—Victor Greenhut, from Ceramics for Paper in Wachtman, ed. Ceramic Innovations in the 20th Century. As quoted in Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element, by Suzanne Stauback, 2005.
Lustreware
“Islamic potters used cobalt on creamy white tin-glazed ware to great effect. Images of people and animals were considered idolatrous and were forbidden, but as is often the case, restrictions led to creative solutions. Working within the rules of their religious leaders, Islamic potters covered their wares with curvaceous calligraphy, delicate flowers, leafy vines, and intricate geometric patterns. . . .
Lustreware was an innovative answer to the stricture against metal tableware. Islamic potters discovered that if they painted designs on their already fired pots using powdered gold or silver or copper (metal oxides) mixed with a bit of water and perhaps clay, and then refired these pots at low temperatures in a reducing (smoky) kiln, the designs emerged from the kiln with a soft metallic sheen.
Lustreware is more understated than brightly gilt enamels or shiny metal pots, and has a rich and subtle complexity of tones that can only be achieved with skillful firing.”
—Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element, 2005.
The invention of glassmaking
“The invention of glassmaking was . . . dependent upon ceramics and in fact, in scientific circles, glass is considered a ceramic. The first glasses . . . were glazes. The Egyptians discovered that by mixing ashes (potassium), ground-up sand (silica), and natron (salt from dried lake beds), they could give their pots a shiny coating. What they were doing was “fluxing” the silica. They learned by accident or through experiment that if they took a bowl of this glaze, especially one that had more flux and less silica, from the kiln while still molten, it could be poured into a clay mold and then cooled to form an object. Glass was equated with gems and was as highly prized.”
—Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element, 2005.
Bernard Palissy (1510–1590)
“In the sixteenth century, French potter Bernard Palissy (1510–1590) stunned the public with his brightly glazed platters covered with high-relief snakes, frogs, lizards, fish, lobsters, shells, flowers, leaves, and vines. Nothing like these highly original trompe l’oeil dishes had been attempted or conceived of before. Palissy’s plates were encrusted with amphibians and reptiles so realistic they looked as if they were alive, and his artifice of mixing animals, shells, and flowers in juxtapositions that would never be encountered in nature dazzled the public.”
—Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element, 2005.
The greatest ceramic artist of all
“The greatest ceramic artist of all, of course, is Mother Nature. With the tiniest speck of clay, a mere particle floating in the air, she seeds the magic crystals we know as snowflakes.”
—Suzanne Stauback, from Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element, 2005.
the camera’s elevated eye
“[Let us consider] the paradox of the “immobile tracking shot”, in which the camera does not move: the shift from reality to the real is accomplished by the intrusion into the frame of a heterogeneous object. For an example we can return to The Birds, in which such a shift is achieved during one long fixed shot. A fire caused by a cigarette butt dropped into some gasoline breaks out in the small town threatened by the birds. After a series of short and “dynamic” close-ups and medium shots that draw us immediately into the action, the camera pulls back and up and we are given an overall shot of the entire town taken from high above. In the first instant we read this overall shot as an “objective”, “epic” panorama shot, separating us from the immediate drama going on down below and enabling us to disengage ourselves from the action. This distancing at first produces a certain “pacifying” effect; it allows us to view the action from what might be called a “metalinguistic” distance. Then, suddently, a bird enters the frame from the right, as if coming from behinid the camera and thus from behind our own backs, and then three birds, and finally an entire flock. The same shot takes on a totally different aspect, it undergoes a radical subjectivisation: the camera’s elevated eye ceases to be that of a neutral, “objective” onlooker gazing down upon a panoramic landscape and suddenly becomes the subjective and threatening gaze of the birds as they zero in on their prey.”
—Slavoj Zizek, The Hitchcockian Blot, from the collection Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, edited by Richard Allen and S. Ishii Gonzales, 1999.
“The North Star brightens the ring”
“The . . . equestrian called “The North Star”. . . Levi J. North was small, only five feet six, but so proportioned that he looked his best on the back of a horse. . . . Just twelve years old, he made his debut in 1826. . . . Before long, North’s dark-skinned, light-haired good looks and consummate grace on horseback had made him the leading principal rider in the United States. . . .
In fact, using the word star to mean a person distinguished in his field may have originated with North. “The North Star brightens the ring,” one newspaper put it, and so it was for forty years, either in his own circus or those of others.”
—John Culhane, from The American Circus: An Illustrated History, 1990.
Every clown face in the world
“All circus clowns are of only three basic types. Every clown face in the world is a variation of the whiteface clown, the auguste (rhymes with “roost”), and the character clown.
The whiteface clown derives from the classic Pierrot, the white clown of French pantomime. . . . His clown face is all white, with the features (eyebrows, nose, mouth) painted on in black and red, and other decorations, if wanted, in various other colors. . . . When interacting, the whiteface quickly becomes an authority figure—the adult or parent or boss.
The auguste is the scapegoat, the recalcitrant child, the foolish employee, the country bumpkin among city slickers. He is overtly funny, so he wears the most comic clown face. . . . The base color is pink or reddish instead of white. The features (red and black) are of enormous size. . . . The mouth is usually thickly outlined with white, and white is often used around th eyes. The auguste is the most slapstick of all clowns; his actions are wilder and broader, and he gets away with more. . . .
The whiteface represents order and authority and the auguste represents disorder and rebellion, the two most basic psychological types of the human race. . . .
In contrast, the character clown is a comic slant on some of the roles we play: cops, farmers, ethnics; and the makeup is a comic slant on the standard human face. . . .
The most well-known character clown is the tramp or hobo, and has been for decades. In the 1890s, jugglers on the vaudeville stage often dressed as tramps to burlesque the then-popular ‘salon jugglers,’ who wore white tie and tails and juggled top hats and canes. Tramp jugglers wore rags and juggled old plug hats and cigar boxes. . . .
Charlie Chaplin made the tramp character clown universally popular with his film comedies, starting in 1914 and continuing through such masterpieces as The Tramp (1915) and The Gold Rush (1925) to Modern Times (1936).”
—John Culhane, from The American Circus: An Illustrated History, 1990.
Royal Golden Chariots, Made in London, Forty Feet High
“THE GREAT STREET PAGEANT with its Royal Golden Chariots, Made in London, Forty Feet High, Surmounted with Revolving Tableaux of Golden Elephants, Lions, and Tigers, Mingling with a gorgeously caparisoned [sic] retinue of living Elephants, Camels, Gnoos, and Zebras.”
—advertisement from 1871, the first year of P.T. Barnum’s Circus, from Barnum’s Struggles and Triumphs, 1877 edition. As quoted in The American Circus: An Illustrated History by John Culhane, 1990.