Table of contents for Autumn 2019 in Smith Journal

Christopher Columbus, to pick one example, understood he could reach the East Indies by sailing his boat west of Spain across the Atlantic. He continued to understand this well after he set foot in the Bahamas, and was no more dissuaded of the belief when he stopped, finally, at the shores of Central and South America. When he eventually died, he did so believing he’d merely found a more convenient route to East Asia – the idea that he had stumbled on a continent not on any European map never occurred to him. Later, when a few quizzical sailors realised Columbus’s East Asia really wasn’t East Asia at all, the West was forced to confront the possibility that there remained things – entire continents, even – about which humans did…

THE CURATORS’ SMILES WEREN’T THE ONLY THINGS THAT WERE FAKE ON THE DAY OF THE MUSEUM’S GRAND REOPENING. The staff of Musée Terrus, a museum in the small French town of Elne, were supposed to be celebrating the completion of extensive renovations. Instead, they found themselves fronting the press to explain some slight adjustments to its collection. Namely, the fact they had just donated a substantial proportion of the museum’s paintings by Étienne Terrus, the 19th -century French artist for whom the museum was named, to the police – and not for philanthropic reasons. A visiting curator who had popped by during the renovations noticed something awry with the collection almost instantly. For starters, the style of many of the paintings was a bit off, and the canvases weren’t quite…

COINS HAVE ALWAYS MEANT MORE THAN THEIR FACE VALUE; THEIR DESIGNS REVEAL THE IDEALS OF THE SOCIETIES THAT MINTED THEM. One American folk craft elevates money even more explicitly, transforming legal tender into art by modifying the bas-relief engravings on coins. Because itinerant workers tended to have plenty of boxcar-ridin’ time on their hands to carve coins – plus the key materials already in their pockets – these miniature sculptures became known as ‘hobo nickels’. The U.S. five-cent coin proved the perfect canvas: it’s soft enough for easy carving, wide enough for details, thick enough to be sturdy… and cheap enough to treat as an art material. The earliest hobo nickels date back to the 1850s, but the golden age really kicked off in 1913, with the introduction of the…

How’d you end up with all these cornflakes? I’ve always been interested in butterflies because they’re so fragile and their lifecycle is so strange. I didn’t want to start buying them because they are endangered, but a collection of butterflies is just the most beautiful thing I could think of. So I started making cornflake butterflies, pinning them out in little boxes. Then the cornflakes evolved into a collection in their own right, rather than me trying to turn them into something they weren’t. What’s the idea behind this project? It’s a tongue-in-cheek reflection on taxonomy and the process of displaying and collecting. I’m interested in museums and collections and all the things that go around museology. You’ve got lepidopterology and entomology and all these other -ologies. I shall have…

A HUSH DESCENDED ON A PACKED AUDITORIUM IN VERSAILLES, FRANCE. THE 26TH GENERAL CONFERENCE ON WEIGHTS AND MEASURES (CGPM) WAS MAKING A MOMENTOUS DECISION: HOW TO DEFINE A KILOGRAM. The metric system – officially known as the International System of Units (SI) – has been slowly finessed since its beginnings in the French Revolution. But on this day, Friday 16 November, 2018, the assembled delegates were voting on a resolution to redefine all seven base units of measurement for the first time using physical constants – fundamental, unchanging properties of the cosmos that can be pinpointed with great accuracy. Like an extremely nerdy answer to the Eurovision Song Contest, the 54 delegates voiced their assent in turn, in either French or English. Australia was fifth. Dr Bruce Warrington, the nation’s…

BORN: June 3, 1906, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A. DIED: April 12, 1975, Paris, France WERE ONE TO LOOK AT THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF JOSEPHINE BAKER TAKEN DURING HER SURREALLY EVENTFUL LIFE, ONE MIGHT ASSUME THAT ONE WAS CONTEMPLATING THE COLLECTED HEADSHOTS OF SOME HACK ACTOR WHOSE AGENT WAS UNDER STANDING INSTRUCTION TO SAY “YES” TO EVERY OFFER, HOWEVER PREPOSTEROUS OR UNBELIEVABLE. A showgirl clad in a bikini fashioned substantially from bejewelled bananas. A wealthy chateau owner walking a pet cheetah in a diamond collar. A four-times-married philanthropic matriarch who adopted a dozen orphans from all over the world. A bisexual libertine. A civil rights activist. A nightclub crooner. A war hero. A spy. Josephine Baker was actually all of those things, and more besides – and she was actually all of…

SINET CHAN WAS BORN IN BATTAMBANG PROVINCE, CAMBODIA, IN 1990. Her parents lost their respective battles with HIV when she was young. After their deaths, Chan and her siblings were sent to an orphanage. She was 10 years old and, having spent her life in poverty up to that point, was hopeful the orphanage would provide a fresh start. She had no idea how bad things were about to get. At the orphanage, when Chan and the other children weren’t tending to the orphanage director’s farm, they were forced to dance, sing, and play games with the tourists who’d come to visit. The mandatory theatrics encouraged donations, which went straight to the director. Meanwhile, there was never enough food to eat, and the children often had to hunt mice, catch…

KEEP MOVING Even if nobody pays attention to what I’m doing or if they don’t think it’s any good, I feel better if I’m expressing myself in some way. It’s important to just keep going, however you can. I think this is part of the human experience. I’m not someone for whom anything comes easily, and nothing ever feels right. But I just fill up an hour with jokes, then I do it a billion times and maybe themes or a direction emerge out of that. It’s a great feeling to plan to do something, then do it – especially if it’s a bit scary or uncomfortable. The most recent hour of standup I’ve been working on is exciting for me, and I hope it’s exciting for other people, too.…

ELISHA OTIS’S DEMONSTRATION WAS GOING SPLENDIDLY WHEN A MAN WITH AN AXE BEGAN SWINGING. An inventor with a penchant for spectacles, Otis had booked a spot at the 1854 World’s Fair in New York City, where he planned to sell the starry-eyed masses on something both radical and mundane: vertical transport. Or rather, safe vertical transport. Humans had been hoisting things into the sky for aeons by the time Otis came around, but no one had worked out how to stop those things crashing down violently when the ropes inevitably snapped and gravity was reintroduced into the equation. For this reason, civilization had largely opted to stay on terra firma. The future seemed decidedly flat. The first elevator, invented by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, employed a system of pulleys and…

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I GREW UP OUTSIDE. MY SISTER AND I BUILT FORTS. WE DUG HOLES. WE MADE TRAILS AND SWUNG ON VINES. THE INDOORS WAS A PLACE RESERVED FOR SLEEPING, OR FOR PLAYING WHEN IT GOT SO COLD OUTSIDE THAT OUR FINGERS SEEMED AS THOUGH THEY MIGHT FALL OFF (WE LIVED IN RURAL MICHIGAN, WHERE THAT COULD HAPPEN WELL INTO THE SPRING). BUT THE OUTDOORS – THAT’S WHERE WE LIVED. In the time since our childhood, the world has fundamentally changed. Kids today grow up primarily indoors, their lives punctuated by short bouts of movement from one building to another. This is not hyperbole. The average American child now spends 93 per cent of his or her time in a building or a vehicle. The data are…

PICTURE, IF YOU WILL, AN INFINITE TWO-DIMENSIONAL GRID, MADE UP OF AN INFINITE NUMBER OF SQUARES. Each of these squares can be in one of two states: alive or dead. An alive square is shaded; a dead one is blank. In the beginning, every square is blank, but you, the creator, can add life. You fill in as many squares as you want, in whatever configuration you want, and then click start. What happens next looks like a biological experiment in fast forward. Life blooms and expands in swirling arabesque patterns, before slowing and dwindling into a still, empty expanse, marked only by a few lingering fossils. All in all, it may have taken around 20 seconds. Congratulations: you just played the Game of Life. And yes, inasmuch as this…

PETER RUSSO, ‘FAR EASTERN EDITOR’ AT THE ARGUS, TOOK TO HIS TYPEWRITER TO REASSURE A SHAKEN NATION. It was the early 1950s and the Cold War was raging. But Russo wasn’t writing about the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu or the Korean People’s Army massing at the 38th parallel. He was writing about stolen dim sims. Two days earlier, the proprietor of a Chinese cafe in Melbourne rang the police to report a theft of the thick meat- and cabbage-stuffed dumplings. By the time the police arrived, the trace was cold – and probably the dim sims, too. Russo allayed Australia’s worst fears. “Investigations have uncovered no sinister purpose behind the disappearance from a local Chinese cafe of 100 dozen dim sims,” he wrote. “For a time it was…

DAVID MILARCH HAS MASTERED THE TRICK OF TALKING WITH A CIGARETTE HANGING FROM THE CORNER OF HIS MOUTH – A USEFUL SKILL WHEN YOU NEVER STOP TALKING AND NEVER STOP SMOKING. As the light of the low Michigan winter sun pours through his office blinds, he leans back in his chair, arms folded behind his head, explaining how he’s the only man he knows who ever got kicked out of heaven. On the wall behind him, next to a printout of Stonehenge and the pencil-scratched heights of his grandchildren, is a poster – an unattributed proverb that’s as succinct a mission statement as you might find for Milarch and the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive he founded: A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they shall never…

IN 2013, ALEXANDER GRAND FLEW TO BELARUS WITH A RATHER ODD MISSION. HE WANTED TO BOTTLE THE SCENT OF MINSK. “If you ask most people to describe the aroma of Minsk, they’ll say it smells like cut grass, or maybe sour cranberries in sugar,” he says. “But that’s not how we approached it. Minsk is a rational city, very cool, very clinical: a city of engineers and IT professionals. We wanted the scent to be light and orderly and meticulous. It should smell like the colour of a wide blue sky.” After a little groundwork, the 38-year-old Englishman tracked down an ancient family of Belarusian perfumers and set them to work blending 47 local ingredients to make Eau de Minsk. “Government ministers were coming by for a sniff,” Alexander remembers.…

I MISSED THE DEADLINE TO SUBMIT THIS PIECE THREE TIMES. For six weeks it hung around my neck like a disappointed albatross, a scowl pulled tightly across its metaphoric beak. (Side note: find a photo of a happy albatross. You can’t. No wonder we associate these animals with burdens when they look like they’re silently judging everything. Albatross, mate – if you want things to change, start by changing yourself.) I originally pitched this article as a critique of the Protestant work ethic and the existential quandary its focus on productivity has plunged us all into. So I figured the editor was on notice that I wasn’t going to deliver this piece on time: not only was I asserting that humans need something other than work to derive meaning from…

A rising tide lifts all boats; in London, rising rents lift even more. A housing crisis is driving an increasing number of people to drop anchor in the city’s 160-kilometre network of canals. Where a one-bedroom flat with canal views can set you back a small fortune, a mooring spot on a canal can cost as little as £6,000 a year. Meanwhile, ‘continuous cruisers’, who move their boats every fortnight and never return to the same place twice, don’t pay a penny. To find out what life on the water has to offer, photographer Carl Bigmore spent time with some of the city’s most dedicated boaters. He learned how maintenance alone can amount to a part-time job, while creature comforts such as electricity, hot water and plumbing are harder to…

LIKE THE PRESOCRATICS BEFORE HIM, ARISTOTLE BELIEVED SPONTANEOUS GENERATION (LIVING ORGANISMS ARISING FROM NON-LIVING MATTER WITHOUT CAUSE) TO BE BOTH COMMONPLACE AND A MATTER OF SCIENTIFIC FACT. It should not seem so remarkable, then, that he posited that eels, bearing neither milt nor spawn, materialise in “the guts of the earth”, deriving “from nothing”. Four hundred years later, Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, similarly misdirected by the creatures’ apparent anatomical limitations, insisted that “eels rub against rocks and the scrapings come to life; this is their only way of breeding.” As recently as the 17th century, fishing enthusiast Izaak Walton proposed that eels were bred from “dew falling in the month of May… which in a few dayes is, by the Sun’s heat, turned into Eeles”. Flemish physiologist Jan Baptist…

MY FIRST MEMORIES OF DUNGEONS & DRAGONS WEREN’T REALLY MY OWN MEMORIES AT ALL. I was four and a bit, and my mum and auntie had taken me to see my first-ever movie in the cinema: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, on its 1986 Australian re-release, in a little picture house in regional South Australia. I recall a hazy kitchen, leadlight lampshades, and a group of boys yelling at each other: “You’ll have to ask Steve, he’s a game master – he has absolute power.” That’s kind of the extent of my hazy D&D memories, because shortly after E.T. himself appeared on screen and screamed at Elliott, I was myself carried screaming from the cinema. That night and countless nights following it, E.T. visited me in my dreams. These nightmares continued until…

What’s the deal with these souped-up scooters? Some call them Vespa Sampah (Garbage Vespa), but their owners prefer the term Vespa Ekstrim (Vespa Extreme). It’s a relatively recent phenomenon, though Indonesia has been in love with the Vespa since the 1960s, when the government gifted scooters to peacekeeping troops returning from duty in Congo. Later, when Japanese bikes became more popular, the classic Vespa turned into something with nostalgic associations, and a community of Vespa lovers started to spread throughout the archipelago. Why did people start modifying their scooters like this? It’s been said the emergence of Vespa Ekstrim in the early 2000s coincided with the social changes that followed the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime. Indonesians suddenly enjoyed greater freedom of self-expression and were no longer as afraid…