blaxploitation films.
“A term coined by Variety to describe a series of Hollywood genre films made in the early 1970s, featuring black performers, that were produced for a black audience.”
—American Cinema/American Culture, by John Belton, 1994.
film noir.
Literally meaning “black film,” film noir refers to a style or mode of filmmaking, which flourished between 1941 and 1958, that presents narratives involving crime or criminal actions in a manner that disturbs, disorients, or otherwise induces anxiety in the viewer.
—American Cinema/American Culture, by John Belton, 1994.
She used to let her golden hair fly free
“She used to let her golden hair fly free
For the wind to toy and tangle and molest;
Her eyes were brighter than the radiant west.
(Seldom they shine so now.)”
—Francis Petrarch (1304-1374), She Used to Let Her Golden Hair Fly Free.
a great void
“When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling, into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.”
—Henry Miller, from Tropic of Cancer, 1961.
the violet light of the stars
“Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. . . . Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust—what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster.”
—Henry Miller, from Tropic of Cancer, 1961.
The play of refracted light
“The Projection Screen. Here is to be found the interpretation of [Kasimir] Malevich’s last picture [White on White, 1918]—the plain white surface, which constituted an ideal plane for kinetic light and shadow effects which, originating in the surroundings, would fall upon it. In this way, Malevich’s picture represented a miniature cinema screen. . . .
The play of refracted light. In the continuation of this work we must undoubtedly come to the manipulation of moving, refracted light (color); we must “paint” with flowing, oscillating prismatic light. . . .”
—Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, from The New Vision, 1947.
the theory of neoplasticism
“Using only the primary plastic elements: the straight line, the right angle, the rectangle, and the colors yellow, red, blue (primary colors), white, gray, and black (neutral colors), the De Stijl painters formed the structural syntax which was automatically translated into the theory of neoplasticism.”
—Daniele Baroni, from The Furniture of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, 1977.
the principle of primary colors
“[T]he De Stijl artists—including Rietveld in his early furniture—held rigidly to the principle of primary colors—red, blue and yellow—together with the use of noncolors like gray, white, and black, and rejected the contamination of complementary and secondary colors.”
—Daniele Baroni, from The Furniture of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, 1977.
the ‘flim flam’
“[W]hen I had got hold of a bank roll, I gave up the rough graft of picking pockets and started in what was called at that time “sure thing graft” such as the “flim flam,” or more properly speaking, short changing with a ten or twenty dollar bill. I worked this graft for about six months and was very successful.
In the meantime, I became acquainted with the men in the the green goods business. . . .”
—George Appo, from his unpublished autobiography; quoted by Timothy J Gilfoyle in A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York, 2006.
The green goods game
“The green goods game worked like this: Operators sent out letters or “circulars” throughout the United States claiming that they possessed stolen or discarded currency engraving plates from the U.S. Treasury. The circular offered genuine-looking counterfeit money, or “green goods,” to prospective buyers at cut-rate prices. For one hundred dollars one could purchase twelve hundred dollars in counterfeit notes; six hundred dollars bought ten thousand dollars of the same. For purchasing the maximum, the individual was promised “states rights,” or a monopoly on the green goods in his region. . . .
The most successful green goods operations required considerable finance, thoughtful planning, elaborate hierarchies, and police or political protection. Leading financial backers, or “capitalists,” supplied bankrolls of three thousand to twenty thousand dollars to display before potential victims, a huge sum of money in an age when unskilled workers earned less than one thousand dollars annually. . . .
The best defense . . . was that the green goods game was legal. Since such swindlers displayed genuine currency during their transactions, they were not guilty of fraud, counterfeiting, or any other statutory crime. . . . A cunning green goods operator used only legal tender . . . ‘which he pretends to be counterfeit.’”
—Timothy J Gilfoyle, from A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York, 2006.