There are two types of Hula dance. just like there is two types of American Indian art. That would be Pre-Western world and Post-Western world.
The Pre-Western world Hula was an integral tradition of a great cultural, spiritual and social significance. (Again…just like Pre-Western Native American Indian art.)
The Post-Western Hula is a way for American women to discover their hips. Or to look coy. Or to ham it up for their hubby. Or, now that I think of it…a way to be slightly offensive to a culture which spread from Tahiti to New Zealand, with hula hotspots in Hawaii, Somoa, Tonga and other locales.
The Post-Western world American Indian art was produced for sale, at slave wages, by people transitioned to reservations in need of a survival income.
Okay…factual but unfortunate history lesson out of the way. No, wait. It gets worse.
When Protestant missionaries arrived in the Hawaiian islands, they immediately found the traditional dance obscene. First step of learning the Hula? BAN it. By the time of our Civil War, the missionaries had managed to nearly stamp out the Hula on the islands, and believe it or not, LICENSED it so when it occurred in public, it was closely monitored.
The missionaries didn't know about, or didn't believe in, or didn't enjoy women's hips. Especially women's hips which were apparently enjoying themselves. It is pretty hard not to smile when either watching or dancing the hula. The hula was hot. The hula was Shakira on a good day.
(According to Wiki, the missionaries allowed the dance to continue in their OWN little Christian hovels, but denied it to the natives. That too is an old story. )
Am I being too harsh? Nope. The church has a history of banning hip-dances. You want a little "Hippy, Hippy Shake?" Well…okay. But by those cute mop-top Beatles, not Chan Romero, the "ethnically outside" Spanish and Apache man who wrote it.
The real, original, deeply rooted cultural dance known as the hula signifies nature, an ocean wave, a yearning, and a whole spectrum of deep, complex meanings… but the interlopers only saw the hips. I am not sure if the cocoanut breast covering now seen at vacation resorts was part of the original dance, but I don't have to look it up. I don't think so.
Is there ANYTHING good to say about the history of the Hula? Yes. Hula Hoops. The recent fitness craze. The sound of the grass skirts and the brief glimpses hinting at what is within. And again…the smiles.
I collected these vintage photographs of American women doing the hula "ham it up" just to tell this story. See how an image can be worth a thousand words? So can a video. Here is Chan rocking it. Chan wasn't afraid of hips, but Ed Sulllivan was. Look up Elvis. He liked Hawaii too.
Maybe one day I'll tell the story of the slide guitar and what it meant in Hawaii.
Group of Vintage Snapshots of Hula, American Style. All circa 1930 - 1945 Collection Jim Linderman
BROWSE AND ORDER BOOKS BY JIM LINDERMAN HERE ON BLURB.COM EBOOKS ARE ALL $5.99 EACH. PAPERBACK AND HARDCOVERS ARE MORE EXPENSIVE, BUT AVAILABLE.
The Hold Up, Professor Woodruff's masterpiece. Speculating here, I am going to guess Woodruff painted his dream, or a vision, or an obsession. I hope it was not painted from life, as it appears to show a man holding a gun on a nude woman, And Woodruff seems pretty darn proud of himself. I have checked the inventories of some lauded institutions with no luck. Does anyone out there know where Woodruff's rough masterpiece ended up?
(Just for the record, see the link HERE)
Real Photo Postcard circa 1915 collection Jim Linderman
BOOKS AND EBOOKS BY JIM LINDERMAN (MORE COMING)
ARE AVAILABLE HERE
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Hollywood is the primary force encouraging our increasingly record low approval body of lawmakers (many of whom wouldn't know how to even ask their congressional intern how to look something up for them) to limit what appears on the internet. My contribution to the protest is not a blank screen, It is this not at all subtle reminder that Hollywood has been censoring what we see for decades. Here some proud hired anti-intellectual freedom goons show off the fine job they are doing at keeping us safe from what we want. Who were the DPS? I don't know, Wiki is down today.This picture is from 1929 (the year before Hollywood clamped down on what was shown on the screen officially) and likely represents one of the several organizations which emerged to stop miscegenation, various words, various body parts, sexuality of any kind and insisting on happy endings (no, not THAT kind...the kind where anyone breaking the law gets caught and punished at the end of the movie.) A year after this picture was taken, the Motion Picture Production Code was accepted and practiced by the entire movie industry...thus insuring what we choose to pay and see is light, harmless fare, safe for all and neutered of anything challenging or controversial.Thanks guys...how about going after what I read next?So this is the track record of the folks who today want a bill passed to limit content on the web and give authorities the right to control what appears on domains.Take a minute to contact your probably rich, probably male and probably Caucasian representative and tell him to keep his hands off the internet. It is working fine, the rich are still getting richer, not to worry (by FAR) and the minute they start to regulate it they'll muck it up like everything else they touch.They think they are unpopular now? Just wait until they get 60 million school kids mad at them.Original Photograph "Motion Picture Censorship 1929" by P.E. Genereux, E. Lynn, MA Collection Jim Linderman
Using an archive of original and rare mail-order brochures from the 1950s and 1960s collected by Victor Minx, SMUT BY MAIL: VINTAGE GRAPHICS FROM THE GOLDEN DAYS OF OBSCENITY illustrates some 150 examples of art, graphics and design used to promote and sell soft-core pornography in glorious crumpled but colorful glory!
From a time when the mere delivery of a pamphlet such as these could result in an arrest! A staggering collection, assembled over a decade, shows vintage "come-ons" which wiggled a finger in print form to men all over the country. From back page ads came a flood of amateur and mob-run smut to your very doorstep courtesy of the U.S Mail, all of it wrapped in the ubiquitous plain brown wrapper.
Remarkable as it seems today, even primitive, hand-cranked projectors and 3-D viewers which allowed a blurry but taboo glimpse were offered along with stag films, photo-sets and slides.
Today laughable and virtually innocent, at the time the producers (and booksellers) of the material were hounded by postal authorities and subjected to numerous censorship arrests. The essay by Jim Linderman reveals how this censorship, now seen as absurd, occurred at a time when the word "freedom" was bandied about by moral watchdogs with their own hidden secrets and agendas.Colorful, vibrant and often downright odd, it is another example of formerly lost and forgotten art being brought to light by Dull Tool Dim Bulb Books. Striking primitive and naive graphics which pre-date the punk esthetic by 20 years.
25 pages of the 2011 book are available for preview HERE.
Certainly one of the most unusual and interesting vernacular art books of the year, and once again a forgotten area of art history brought to light by Dull Tool Dim Bulb Books.
160 pages. 10" x 8" Full Color with an essay by Jim Linderman Hardcover and Paperback
Dull Tool Dim Bulb books published by Blurb.com
This little "Flex-o-View" collapsible cardboard 35mm slide viewer from the Fifties is pretty hard to find today. Want to know where at least one resides? In box 2070 of the American Civil Liberties Union Records in the Audiovisual Materials collection being held at the Princeton University Library Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. What? For a simple "SQUEEZE to Focus" hand held slide viewer from Hollywood made in the early 1950s by Synchromatic Pictures? What possible interest could the nation's finest lawyers and civil rights watchdogs have in this little folded up optical device with a cheap plastic lens?
Someone on your payroll thought it inappropriate for you or anyone else to view naked women through it, or at least to use the public mails to get them to you. And so the little fellow the ACLU owns is indexed under "POST OFFICE - 1950 - BAN ON SLIDES OF NUDES" and it sits in the box with 5 racy examples. Ridiculous? I can imagine the ACLU lawyer saying the same thing as he held this up in the courtroom.Cardboard Folding "Squeeze to Focus" Optical slide viewer circa 1950 Collection Jim Linderman
Beach censors pass judgement in Atlantic City, 1924.Original Press Photograph, "Bare Legs Being O.K.'D" 1924 Collection Jim Linderman
Calendar Girl, Cheescake, Pin-up Girl, Centerfold, Glamour Girl. All names for more or less the same thing. Paper dolls in vibrant color good for a month. Now frowned upon...but frowned upon back then too, note the strategic banners. This is a group of four pages from a Salesman Sample for calendars, circa 1955, which were censored in bold manner, nothing subtle about it. It must have been frustrating for printers to keep getting hauled into court in every city the local mailman happened to peek into the bulk mail. As any man my age will attest, every single gas station had a similar calendar hanging in the grease shop. They always hung askew in the same place. It was an annual ritual for the boss to open one up in January and start a new year. It allowed a few minutes of supervisor/subordinate bonding before another year of oil changes began. It is odd that breasts are so often (even to this day) censored, especially as they are nearly always the first pleasant encounter of every mammal, including both sexes of the two-legged kind. The entire convoluted history of 20th century commercial titillation and censorship is a topic I hope to wrestle with in future posts, but for the time being I am content just to "hang these on the wall" so to speak.Four Lithograph printed Salesman Sample Calendar Pages c. 1955 Collection Jim Linderman
