viz.

(Image credit: Harry Ransom Center)

The other day I was walking through the ongoing Norman Bel Geddes exhibition over at the Harry Ransom Center, and I spotted a photo of the designer with Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. You wouldn’t believe my surprise. What in the world were Robinson and Campanella doing with Bel Geddes? Up until that point in the gallery, I’d seen absolutely nothing having to do with baseball. And I didn’t think I would. Bel Geddes aesthetic preoccupation with what on the surface appears to be simply aerodynamics suggests a version of the future that we’re still trying to attain, like Ahab and his whale. Whether our cities will ever look like his remains to be seen. Perhaps I’m missing the point a bit, and maybe much of Bel Geddes’ work represents aesthetic advertisements rather than specific blueprints. But one can’t deny that Bel Geddes’ designs intently seek the immediate, the sleek, and the fashionable. These are all preoccupations inherently at odds with the boredom of baseball.

Image Credit: Steve Rhodes

I’ve always loved the moment in David Foster Wallace’s “Big Red Son” when he praises Las Vegas for being the least pretentious city in America. What an astute thing to say. Who among us could have looked at, for example, the Bellagio’s famous fountain, Paris Las Vegas or the Venetian and describe them as not pretentious? (The Wynn complex wasn’t built yet, but everything interior designer Roger Thomas has done there since confirms Wallace’s point.) The irony Wallace is highlighting, of course, is the fact that these institutions pretend to be nothing other than what they are: spaces smartly designed for people to come into and enjoy wasting their money. They don’t pretend to be otherwise. No Vegas weekender sees the Paris’ Eiffel Tower and looks for the Louvre, because that structure isn’t there to trick people into thinking they’re across the ocean: it’s there to encourage people to luxuriate in their extravagance. Wallace makes this point, I suspect, because deep down he was worried that a certain degree of pretentiousness in modern American culture is fostering a strong undercurrent of cynicism. With all the naïveté of Wallace’s ideal citizen, I’m hoping the Miami Marlin’s new stadium, aptly named Marlins Park, isn’t a great example of what Wallace was worried about.

Image Credit: E.O. Goldbeck

Over the next couple of weeks viz. will be putting up a series of posts celebrating the etched glass façade of the Harry Ransom Center, and I thought I’d get things rolling with a discussion of a baseball picture I’ve always noticed on the southeast corner of the building. The hand-written caption on the bottom of the photograph’s etching reads “The New York Yankees as seen in San Antonio, Texas – March 31^st, 1922.” San Antonio’s never had a Major League Baseball team, so it’s always struck me as a little bit odd that the Yanks might venture that far south. That said, Babe Ruth stands in the center of the picture, and on first glance it seems entirely probable that the team is on some sort of exhibition tour. Anyways, I thought I’d take a moment and research the photograph before speculating on the reasons for its placement on the outside of the Ransom Center.

Image Credit: New York Times

When I looked through The New York Times’s feature this week on World Series program covers, the image above stood out. No, it didn’t stand out because of the cute dog peaking out from behind the boy’s right knee, or because the war bonds saleswoman looks like a flight attendant. It stood out simply because on first glace it seemed to depict a young boy dressing as a baseball player in order to go to an important baseball game. The “WAR BONDS AND STAMPS” table looks like it might be part of a turnstile, and the boy looks happy just to be inside of his team’s park. What could be a more fitting image for the Fall Classic of our national pastime?