Bruce Lee, Globetrotters, rope walkers and a diving horse help tell a story of athletic spectacle
The show's 60-some items — books, prints, photographs, all sorts of ephemera (such as pennant, program, and poster) — are thematically organized, while also proceeding in a roughly chronological order. Bruce Lee unleashes his fists of fury at the end of 'All Stars,' not the beginning.
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National Roller Derby Program, 1951.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
The themes are qualities required by athletic entertainers/entertaining athletes: Balance, Strength, Endurance, Daring, Nerve, Teamwork, and Combat (as in bullfighting, wrestling, boxing). Each attribute gets its own display case. There's also one devoted to Roots, with attention paid to the Roman Colosseum, medieval tournaments, Carnival in Renaissance Venice, and equestrian vaulting — it's the person who vaults, not the horse.
'All Stars' does have a
diving
horse. It would take a 40-foot plunge six times a day at Atlantic City's Steel Pier. Other notable performers, most of them human, make appearances. M. Blondin, a French aerialist, crossed Niagara Falls several times on a tightrope on a single day in 1859. A crowd of 25,000 watched. The Fearless Frogman was good at holding his breath. The English Samson was a muscle man, and the Female Hercules a muscle woman. Imagine if they'd met and had children.
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Also encountered are contortionists, acrobats, 'hand balancers,' rope walkers, stunt pilots, 'Bloomer Girls' (members of all-female baseball teams), marathon dancers, and roller derby skaters. Roller derby! Those skaters (unlike the ones in the Balance display) are in the Teamwork section. They could also qualify for Daring, Nerve, and Combat.
Perhaps the most wondrous thing in this gathering of wonders isn't a person (or even a horse) but an object. Robert Cruikshank's 'Going to a Fight,' from 1819, is a panoramic hand-colored etching. It shows 42 scenes leading up to a boxing match. This was five decades before the Marquess of Queensberry came along with his rules, so the bout must have been more UFC than Golden Gloves. The panorama, whose height is a little more than 2½ inches, is rolled up. Its full length is just under 13 feet.
Competition may matter more now, but as proof that sports can remain entertainment simply consider the spectacle that is professional wrestling. It's hard to imagine
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Brian S. Dyde, 'Antigua': hand-colored map, 1985.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
'All Stars' covers a lot of ground conceptually. 'The Caribbean: Sea of Resilience' covers even more ground geographically — the Caribbean basin is slightly more than a million square miles — and with only half as many items. The exhibition runs through Aug. 22.
Colonial exhibition of West Indian fruit and vegetables, c.1890.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
Places visited include Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, St. Croix, and Antigua. Subjects include dance, agriculture, the
The title of 'The Punched Card from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age' is bigger than the show itself, which has just three items (books, not cards). But that makes its subject no less important. 'The Punched Card' runs through Aug. 28.
W. J. Eckert, "Punched Card Methods in Scientific Computation, 1940.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
This year marks the 300th anniversary of a bit of technology associated with main frame computers. Punched paper tape was used in France to automate looms. A century later, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were envisioning how punched cards could be used in ways that anticipated 20th-century computers. The story told here isn't as fun as the one in 'All Stars' or as vibrant (and often chastening) as in 'The Caribbean.' But in its own,
ALL STARS: The Sensational History of Athletics as Entertainment
THE CARIBBEAN: SEA OF RESILIENCE
THE PUNCHED CARD FROM THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION TO THE INFORMATION AGE
At Houghton Library, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, through Aug. 8, Aug. 22, and Aug. 28, respectively. 617-495-2440,
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Mark Feeney can be reached at
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3 days ago
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And the Black folks hate the white folks, To hate all but the right folks Is an old established rule. Liberals uneasy at having to show so much tolerance during what he lampooned as 'National Everyone-smile-at-one-another-hood Week' didn't get a free pass, either. He told them to take heart, though: 'It's only for a week, so have no fear/Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Lehrer, a youthful math prodigy who rose to unlikely international acclaim in the 1950s and '60s with witty songs he began composing and performing as a Harvard student, was 97 when he died Saturday in his Cambridge home. Advertisement He was as sharp as ever intellectually this year, his friends said, adding that even in recent months, batting snippets of song lyrics back and forth was a staple of dinner conversations at Mr. Lehrer's home. 'His main quality as a friend was being loving and endlessly affectionate, though at the same time he was fanatically unsentimental,' said the writer and editor Advertisement As a clever lyricist, Mr. Lehrer had such an unerring ear that for years reporters and critics invoked his name when writing about musical satire. Particularly in the political realm, 'a Tom Lehrer song' was the yardstick against which success was measured. Social or political, no topic was off-limits as he gleefully satirized the Army (' In early 1953, while a graduate student at Harvard University, he recorded an album of what he called 'some allegedly humorous songs' he had written. The initial 400 copies of 'Songs by Tom Lehrer' were mostly intended for relatives and friends, but Mr. Lehrer 'underestimated the national incidence of delayed adolescence,' he joked a few years later, in the annual report of his Harvard class. 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'As unsentimental as he was, he loved the unaffected sincerity and enthusiasm of students,' Kummer said. 'As cynical as he appeared, he completely admired people who weren't cynical but were fresh and raring to show the world their ambition and talent.' For Mr. Lehrer, teaching filled a need that the applause of strangers sitting out beyond the stage lights never satisfied. 'There's bliss and there's delight,' he told The Boston Globe in 1983. 'I'm more interested in delight. Bliss is one state. Humor and mathematics are full of delight. That's where my interest is.' In his later career, Mr. Lehrer lived in Cambridge and spent the winter months teaching courses at the University of California Santa Cruz, in American musical comedy and the nature of mathematics. Income from his music allowed him to teach part time. 'Aside from writing an occasional song and traveling a bit,' he wrote in 1977, 'I spend most of the rest of the year puttering, interrupted now and then by frittering.' Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in New York City on April 9, 1928. Advertisement Studying piano as a child, he set aside classical pieces to focus on musical theater. 'I would do the absolute minimum amount of practicing I would need for my lesson, and then spend hours picking out popular songs,' he told the Globe in 1984. He was 15 upon arriving at Harvard as a freshman in 1943 as part of the class of '47. While writing amusing songs such as 'Fight Fiercely, Harvard,' which poked fun at his college, Mr. Lehrer finished a bachelor's degree in mathematics early, in 1946, and completed a master's the next year, at age 19. He then began years of mathematics doctoral studies at Harvard and wrote that he eventually left 'a thesis shy of a Ph.D.' Stints with the Atomic Energy Commission in New Mexico and at a Cambridge research firm were followed by two years in the Army, working in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1950s. By the late 1950s, his music was attracting considerable attention. 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Tom Lehrer, an acerbic songwriter and Harvard-trained mathematician who rose to fame in the 1950s and '60s by pillorying the sensibilities of the day, has died at age 97. Lehrer died at his home in Cambridge, Mass., on Saturday. His death was confirmed by friends on Facebook. No cause of death was given. The bespectacled Lehrer began performing on college campuses and clubs across the country in the 1950s, playing the piano and singing darkly comedic numbers that he penned on topics such as racial conflict, the Catholic Church and militarism, earning him the sobriquet of 'musical nerd god.' In 'National Brotherhood Week,' which lampooned the brief interlude of imposed tolerance celebrated annually from the 1930s through the early 2000s he wrote: Oh, the white folks hate the black folksand the black folks hate the white folks,to hate all but the right folks is an old established rule …But during National Brotherhood Week (National Brotherhood Week),Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek to fun to eulogizeThe people you despise,As long as you don't let 'em into your school. Lehrer's songs also took aim at then-taboo subjects such as sexuality, pornography and addiction. In 1953, his self-released album 'Songs of Tom Lehrer' became an underground hit. Produced for $40 and promoted by word of mouth, the cover image was of Lehrer in hell playing piano as the devil. It eventually sold an estimated 500,000 copies and sparked demand for concert performances around the world. During the mid-1960s, Lehrer contributed several songs to the satirical NBC news show 'That Was the Week That Was,' hosted by David Frost. The show inspired Lehrer's third album, 'That Was the Year That Was.' Released in 1965, it reached the 18th spot on American music charts. On the occasion of his 90th birthday in 2018, Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote that Lehrer's lyrics were written 'with the facility of William S. Gilbert and tunes that evoked the felicity of Sir Arthur Sullivan. Lehrer's work bounced the absurdities and paranoias of that period back at us, in rhymed couplets and a bouncy piano beat.' Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in New York City on April 9, 1928, to a middle-class family. His father James Lehrer was a successful necktie manufacturer. As a child he took piano lessons but preferred Broadway show tunes — with a particular affection for the works of Gilbert and Sullivan — to the classics. After entering Harvard University at age 15, his penchant for sardonic humor surfaced in his parody song 'Fight Fiercely Harvard,' which challenged the football team's reputation for toughness and earned him a measure of renown on campus. For a time he followed a dual track, music and academia, though he never completed the PhD thesis he began while pursuing doctoral studies at Harvard and Columbia University. After a two-year break between 1955 and 1957 when he served in the Army, Lehrer once again performed concerts across the U.S., Canada and Europe. In a 1959 Time article, the magazine described Lehrer and fellow comedians Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl as the symbols of a new 'sick' comedy. 'What the sickniks dispense is partly social criticism liberally laced with cyanide, partly a Charles Addams kind of jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world.' Lehrer's work opened the door for generations of musical satirists including Randy Newman and 'Weird Al' Yankovic and exerted an influence on everything from the musical skits of 'Saturday Night Live' to the mockumentary 'This Is Spinal Tap.' 'He set the bar for me — and provided an example of how a nerdy kid with a weird sense of humor could find his way in the world,' Yankovic once said of Lehrer. 'Done right, social criticism set to a catchy tune always makes politics easier to digest,' Lizz Winstead, co-creator of 'The Daily Show,' told Buzzfeed in an article examining Lehrer's influence on modern satirical comedy. But Lehrer was first and foremost an academic, over the course of his career teaching math and musical theater at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UC Santa Cruz and working for a time at the Atomic Energy Commission. He viewed entertainment largely as a sideline, and by the late 1960s had grown weary of life in the public eye. After several pauses to focus on his academic pursuits, he stepped off the stage in 1967 following a concert in Copenhagen. In 1971, he wrote songs for the PBS children's series 'The Electric Company.' His last turn in the spotlight was a year later. After performing at a presidential campaign rally for the Democratic nominee, South Dakota Sen. George S. McGovern, he gave up performing for good. Lehrer explained his retreat from the stage by saying that 'political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.' In an interview with the New York Times, he elaborated: 'The Vietnam War is what changed it. Everybody got earnest. My purpose was to make people laugh and not applaud. If the audience applauds, they're just showing they agree with me.' But audiences were not through with Lehrer. After nearly a decade in self-imposed exile, Lehrer became a hit once again in the early 1980s when Cameron Mackintosh, the British theatrical producer, created 'Tomfoolery,' a revue of Lehrer's songs that opened in London's West End before going to to play New York, Washington, Dublin and other cities. Despite the public acclaim, Lehrer maintained a fiercely private life. He never married nor did he have children. In 2020, Lehrer announced through his website that he was making all of the lyrics he wrote available to download for free without further permission, whether or not they were published or retained a copyright. Two years later he went further in relinquishing his rights, saying: 'In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don't send me any money.'
