August 19, 2022 • 19 mins
Holly and Tracy discuss the ways they encountered butterflies in their childhoods and how people can help conservation efforts at home. They also talk through some of the stories of Weegee's life that didn't make it into the episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. We talked about monarch
butterflies this week. We did, and I didn't once drop
(00:24):
into my ten year old child self and talk ad
nauseam about the Monarch from Venture Brothers, which is one
of my favorite animated shows, and the Monarch as a
villain question Mark is a spectacular and very fun character
that show, obviously a little more adult in theme, but
(00:48):
really really wonderful. And they do have a whole thing
about milkweed on one of the episode and how the
monarch became the Monarch who I want, I won't do.
His voice is pretty great. But this is one of
those things that I am curious about and I'm gonna
kind of crowdsource from listeners if they're interested in participating,
because Tracy, I bet you like me, probably at some
(01:11):
point in elementary school went to see like a monarch
chrysalis situation on a field trip, or they came to
you in some way. Yeah. So I remember this in
two different places, and one was we had a place
that at the time was called the Nature Science Center,
which was a you know, nature museum type place aimed
(01:34):
at children. Uh and I so I remember there they
would have like the little stem of milkweed with a
little chrystals on it, and you could see what was
going on with lots of interpretive signs about butterflies. But
then I also remember something that probably was like ordered
from a science supply store or something that was like
(01:56):
a little classroom, tiny little terrarium type ing in the classroom. Yeah,
I am wondering, and my question to listeners, if anybody
has insight, is whether or not they're doing those field
trips these days, even like pre pandemic, because I feel
like there are so many more digital resources than we
(02:17):
I mean, we didn't have digital resources when we were
in elementary school. So I'm wondering if there's still that
kind of like in person learning experience or if um
that's transition more to to digital and online stuff. I
do know that EPCOT during it during Flower and Garden
Festival returing Food and Wine Festival, Epcott at one point
(02:39):
during the year does do like a monarch garden, and
they'll sometimes have a little roosting area that you can
go look at but I think that's a it would
be hard to plan for it. You got to kind
of catch the right time by accident. But yeah, so
I'm curious if you have have kiddos that are elementary
school age and they have done uh Monarch, you know study,
(03:02):
what if if they're still doing in person or if
they are as I suspect possibly many doing online these days.
They're so beautiful. I love them so much. One of
my favorite running outfits was the dress that I painted
to look like a giant monarch butterfly, because I am ridiculous. Um.
I also wanted to mention there was an interesting thing
(03:24):
about Catesby's two volume work UH Natural History, and his
why it took him twenty years to get the second
volume out and a pretty long time to get the
first volume out and it didn't merit inclusion. We already
included a lot of biographical information about people to kind
of give timeline context, and I didn't want to keep
(03:45):
getting bogged down in that. But when he came back,
even though the Royal Society had paid for all of it,
they didn't like pay for his book to be made.
And he was very much a hands on per person
and he did not have the funds to like pay
a printer the normal going rate to get his book published.
(04:08):
So he learned the book publishing process himself, like how
to do book plates, how to do everything. Some of
that delay is a learning curve for him, and then
he sold it via subscription model. It was like the
original indiego go or go fund me kind of thing
where if it meets its goal, I could publish this book.
(04:31):
I just thought that was all very fascinating. Yeah, We've
talked about various people that have like like the model
of getting subscribers to get your book rented, but not
the learning how to do it yourself part. I'm gonna
learn how to run a press. I'm gonna figure out
it appeals to my soul that that kind of that
(04:51):
kind of d I Y approach. Yeah, And I'm just
thinking about we were was it when we were in
I don't know. It was on our West Coast tour
there was a book binder museum that I went to
and I was literally the only person in the museum,
so I basically got like a just by myself guided
tour of the whole place. U there are a lot
of steps in book binding methods that involved urine. So
(05:19):
if you're not schooled in the usage of all of
the urine parts, that seems like it might be particularly unpleasant.
There's some there's a lot of work in the whole thing,
So hats off to you, Mr Catesby in history for
learning how to do all of that yourself. Um. This
was a really interesting one because I knew about Catalina's story.
(05:44):
She since remarried and she has a different last name.
I didn't include it in the episode because, as we mentioned,
like while she has done some stuff and she has
worked with some conservation groups and butterfly in interest groups,
she's not a big like I to be out there
in the public eye person, which is why I did
not include her current last name, even though it's not
hard to find. Um, and I want her to have
(06:06):
credit for what she did, but I also want to
make sure you know you and I normally would not
include a person who is still alive in the podcast.
She's an outlier in that regard, so I wanted to
be as like hyper respectful of her privacy. Yeah, we
have still living people that come up from time to time,
but a lot of times they are still living people.
(06:27):
Who are like a lot more publicly visible then she is,
and so if so and so is a leading academic
researcher who does public history all the time. Bl blah
blah blah. Like that's a different situation from like a
private citizen who was maintaining a pretty private life at
this point. Yeah, she has, he said in interviews like,
(06:48):
I like, I like my quiet life. Yeah, and I
don't want to mess with that. Um. I did notice
there was an interview she did with a butterfly group
where someone was asking how she viewed this whole thing,
and she is saying, you know, people got it wrong
for so long and it's getting better. But also I'm
I'm obviously not directly quoting, but basically like, because there
(07:10):
have now been decades of misinformation, it's really hard to
course correct for a lot of it, which is just
an interesting thing to consider. It's kind of like, I mean,
I wanted to include that aspect of it because we
talk all the time about how, you know, there are
versions of history that get completely inadvertently even or vertent
lye I don't know, um, you know, kind of written
(07:33):
in a way that eliminates key elements or key people
in them, and that was one and it was the
same reason that I wanted to include that discussion of
the fact that Petiver getting all of his amazing samples,
which are lauded still as being like such an incredible collection,
it's tied to really nefarious and not not rosy and
(07:57):
delightful people history. Yeah. Um. We always joked that every
piece of history we talked about is we always discover
is trace back to racism and slavery in many cases.
But I really had not thought about how much naturalist
and biological history and our knowledge was tied to the
(08:19):
slave trade until I read that paper, and then I
was like, oh yeah, and also in other parts of
the world like colonialism and right, yeah, yeah, yeah. The
good news is you can grow milk wheed at home, um,
which I ordered a bunch of And I literally while
I was working on this, I texted a bunch of
(08:41):
my friends. It was basically like, by the way, you're
all going to start growing milk wheat. I already ordered
seeds for everybody to be bossy, but the butterflies need us. Um.
I have had various stabs at growing uh flowers and
nectar plants for insects here in my yard with varying
degrees with success. But one of the things that I
(09:03):
will say, and if you if you go check out
um Monarch joint Venture dot org, which we mentioned at
the end of the podcast, they will link you to resources.
But one of the things that I did read multiple
times is that you should get local milkweed, like the
milkweed that naturally grows in your area, because a lot
of places sell tropical milkweed that will actually confuse sometimes
(09:26):
insects into thinking it's not time to move on. I
don't know if that's true. I'm not an entomologist, but
definitely like local is always better for your area if
you're trying to participate in a project like this um
so it's easy Piecy. You'll have some fun flowers and
then maybe you'll also get cute visitors who doesn't want that. Yeah,
(09:48):
it's interesting. One of the things that came up in
several articles, particularly in this last week where the extinction
endangered species listing was made UH is that several people
in the science community have noted like this is one
of the first species that a lot of people in
(10:08):
North America feel a natural connection to because they see
them in their yards. So hopefully the hope is that
one people will want to do, like take those simple
steps of like growing local flowering plants so that insects
in your area that are important to the whole biosphere
of your area will continue to thrive, but also that
(10:30):
it will kind of help people make a bigger connection
to conservation and to making bigger efforts towards conservation of
species that that they maybe don't have that personal connection to.
So that is my my hope, my hope, my hope.
If you start growing milkweed, send us pictures, tell us
all about it and about your success, because I'm very curious. Um,
(10:53):
I hope we all do such things because I think
that would be great. It's easy. You can even do
it in a planter. You don't have to have a
big tract of lamp. So hopefully will all improve things
and the butterflies will bounce back. I hope. Oh, Tracy,
(11:17):
we talked about Luigi this week. He was tricky for
me in some ways, which you discovered. There were parts
where I had started a sentence and just vanished during
that because I could there were things about his life
that I did not know how to describe in a
way that would be appropriate for our show, because he was,
(11:39):
as we talked about, a womanizer in a way that
had some very misogynist leanings. UM like. He at one
point in his autobiography talked about um offering lessons to
women who wanted to take photography lessons for their hobby,
and he wrote about them, quote, any woman who takes
up photography as a hobby has something emotionally lacking in
(12:02):
her life. She must be emotionally starved as I was.
So it's like this one too punch where he's like,
you wouldn't do this unless you you needed a thrill.
But I also understand because I needed a thrill. Like
it's a little He always has this kind of duality
where he is self deprecating at the same time he's
insulting other people, and I think in his head that
(12:23):
makes it okay. Um. I was pleasantly surprised though about
the ways that he championed in his writing, like not
making spectacles out of people who were different. He had
this very personal sense of right and wrong, and he
(12:44):
relays this one story in his his autobiography where he
was asked for photos of what this editor from another
magazine that was not New York called Abnormal Fellows, and
what he meant was men who wore women's clothing and
in it. In it, we Gi said that he called
(13:05):
that editor and said, you're not getting the pictures. What's
abnormal to you is completely normal to me. Like he
just was like, no, I'm not going to exploit somebody
for your thing. So he had this voyeuristic tendency, but
he was also really weirdly protective of of people in
the fringe of society. It's very, very fascinating. The New
(13:25):
Yorker had to write up about him, in which they
they put it succinctly and much better than I could,
where they described him as both exploitative and humane, which
is a weird, a weird combo, but it's part of
what makes him so fascinating to me. We mentioned his
photos of doctor Strange Love, and if you are doing
calendar math, you may go, wait a minute. Strange Love
(13:49):
didn't come out until the nineteen sixties. I don't know
what the scoop is there. It is always specifically mentioned
as a thing that happened when he was in Hollywood,
but he was back in New York before that. Happened,
So I don't know if it's like a thing where
And I saw that reported in multiple places, so I
wanted to mention it here because it is a little
(14:10):
bit weird. I'm not sure what the scoop is there,
unless he just got called back by Kubrick for that.
There's also an interesting side story story about his life
that when he was working in Acne, he was also
a fiddle player, and he started playing in a movie
theater orchestra huh for a while, and that he hated
(14:33):
talkies because once they became a thing and sound attached
to picture was more common, he couldn't do that job anymore,
which he apparently really loved, and he claimed that he
always hated talkies for the rest of his night. I
mean that seems like a logical grudge to hold. Yeah,
one other thing I wanted to mention because I'm sure
(14:54):
someone will ask he was Jewish. We didn't mention it
in the show because it's kind of like when we
talked about Theodo Vera, he would say things like, oh,
I took this holiday off, but he never talked about
actually observing any religious practices. It's unclear how connected he
was to that as part of his identity versus like
(15:17):
those just being the few days he would take off
a year because he was a workaholic without question. You know.
He he both wrote about himself and it's corroborated by
other accounts that like there would be times when, for example,
like a gangster was expected to be arrested, and so
(15:38):
Press would start to camp out around that person's apartment
building and the other guys would take shifts, and Luigi
would just stay the whole time, Like even if it
took three days, he would not leave. Um, so he
kind of had a his circadian rhythms were different than
everyone else's. I'll just he could not handle the nine
to five day job situation. Uh. The other fun factoried
(16:02):
about him is that he estimates that in his time
at ACME, he took photographs of more than five thousand murders,
which is a lot. That's so many, it is so
many have conflicted feelings about all the crime scene photography. Yeah,
it's um, I mean it's like it's like we said,
(16:23):
he could be very exploitative and also very humane. It's
it's really interesting to me, especially like when you see
the ways he took those pictures is usually pretty unromanticized. Right,
it is a straight photo of like a corpse on
the ground. And then when he takes pictures of people
(16:45):
that were often outsiders, there is often a little bit
more of a loving warmer set up to them, which
you can see, like he feels a greater connection to outsiders. Right.
He even talks about like what other people found beautiful.
He rarely did. Like he talked when he was at
Vogue about finding models kind of like just weird. He
(17:07):
didn't understand them, they didn't seem to understand themselves. In
his opinion, he didn't find anything attractive about a model.
But he was perfectly happy to like meet girls on
the street and just be like, you want to get
in my car and then they would drive around for
a while and maybe hook up. It's a little bit
of a a strange thing, you know, Uigi. Some of
(17:31):
his pictures are so beautiful, some are so upsetting. There's
everything in between. If you go looking, know that you're
probably going to see some blood at minimum. Yeah. I
find the really distorted ones um un nerving. I don't
love them, but I don't know if it's because I,
you know, grew up and came to be interested in
(17:53):
photography and art at a time when he had been
so much before that. I had already seen that kind
of photo playing and editing kind of played out like
to the point where when I find it, when I
actually realized that I was looking at his work, I
was like seeing it. I mean, he you know, his
(18:15):
pictures of New York at night are the real, are
the real, like meat and potatoes of his his work,
and really like the ones that I think most people
find the most engaging versus his later stuff where he
was kind of it seems much more purposely trying to
figure out new ways to make pictures and to make
them interesting, versus just capturing what was interesting about any
(18:37):
given scene on its own. Anyway, that was weechie. If
you have time off this weekend, I hope you look
at some good art. It's just good for your soul.
If you don't have time off, I'm sorry, and I
hope that it is as RESTful as can being. That
you do find some moments of sawace, look at some
pretty art that makes you happy. Um, and I hope
all of your responsibilities play out as beautifully and ideally
(19:00):
as possible. Everybody be good to each other. You will
find us right back here tomorrow with a classic, and
then starting on Monday, we'll have new stuff for you.
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(19:22):
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. We talked about monarch
butterflies this week. We did, and I didn't once drop
(00:24):
into my ten year old child self and talk ad
nauseam about the Monarch from Venture Brothers, which is one
of my favorite animated shows, and the Monarch as a
villain question Mark is a spectacular and very fun character
that show, obviously a little more adult in theme, but
(00:48):
really really wonderful. And they do have a whole thing
about milkweed on one of the episode and how the
monarch became the Monarch who I want, I won't do.
His voice is pretty great. But this is one of
those things that I am curious about and I'm gonna
kind of crowdsource from listeners if they're interested in participating,
because Tracy, I bet you like me, probably at some
(01:11):
point in elementary school went to see like a monarch
chrysalis situation on a field trip, or they came to
you in some way. Yeah. So I remember this in
two different places, and one was we had a place
that at the time was called the Nature Science Center,
which was a you know, nature museum type place aimed
(01:34):
at children. Uh and I so I remember there they
would have like the little stem of milkweed with a
little chrystals on it, and you could see what was
going on with lots of interpretive signs about butterflies. But
then I also remember something that probably was like ordered
from a science supply store or something that was like
(01:56):
a little classroom, tiny little terrarium type ing in the classroom. Yeah,
I am wondering, and my question to listeners, if anybody
has insight, is whether or not they're doing those field
trips these days, even like pre pandemic, because I feel
like there are so many more digital resources than we
(02:17):
I mean, we didn't have digital resources when we were
in elementary school. So I'm wondering if there's still that
kind of like in person learning experience or if um
that's transition more to to digital and online stuff. I
do know that EPCOT during it during Flower and Garden
Festival returing Food and Wine Festival, Epcott at one point
(02:39):
during the year does do like a monarch garden, and
they'll sometimes have a little roosting area that you can
go look at but I think that's a it would
be hard to plan for it. You got to kind
of catch the right time by accident. But yeah, so
I'm curious if you have have kiddos that are elementary
school age and they have done uh Monarch, you know study,
(03:02):
what if if they're still doing in person or if
they are as I suspect possibly many doing online these days.
They're so beautiful. I love them so much. One of
my favorite running outfits was the dress that I painted
to look like a giant monarch butterfly, because I am ridiculous. Um.
I also wanted to mention there was an interesting thing
(03:24):
about Catesby's two volume work UH Natural History, and his
why it took him twenty years to get the second
volume out and a pretty long time to get the
first volume out and it didn't merit inclusion. We already
included a lot of biographical information about people to kind
of give timeline context, and I didn't want to keep
(03:45):
getting bogged down in that. But when he came back,
even though the Royal Society had paid for all of it,
they didn't like pay for his book to be made.
And he was very much a hands on per person
and he did not have the funds to like pay
a printer the normal going rate to get his book published.
(04:08):
So he learned the book publishing process himself, like how
to do book plates, how to do everything. Some of
that delay is a learning curve for him, and then
he sold it via subscription model. It was like the
original indiego go or go fund me kind of thing
where if it meets its goal, I could publish this book.
(04:31):
I just thought that was all very fascinating. Yeah, We've
talked about various people that have like like the model
of getting subscribers to get your book rented, but not
the learning how to do it yourself part. I'm gonna
learn how to run a press. I'm gonna figure out
it appeals to my soul that that kind of that
(04:51):
kind of d I Y approach. Yeah, And I'm just
thinking about we were was it when we were in
I don't know. It was on our West Coast tour
there was a book binder museum that I went to
and I was literally the only person in the museum,
so I basically got like a just by myself guided
tour of the whole place. U there are a lot
of steps in book binding methods that involved urine. So
(05:19):
if you're not schooled in the usage of all of
the urine parts, that seems like it might be particularly unpleasant.
There's some there's a lot of work in the whole thing,
So hats off to you, Mr Catesby in history for
learning how to do all of that yourself. Um. This
was a really interesting one because I knew about Catalina's story.
(05:44):
She since remarried and she has a different last name.
I didn't include it in the episode because, as we mentioned,
like while she has done some stuff and she has
worked with some conservation groups and butterfly in interest groups,
she's not a big like I to be out there
in the public eye person, which is why I did
not include her current last name, even though it's not
hard to find. Um, and I want her to have
(06:06):
credit for what she did, but I also want to
make sure you know you and I normally would not
include a person who is still alive in the podcast.
She's an outlier in that regard, so I wanted to
be as like hyper respectful of her privacy. Yeah, we
have still living people that come up from time to time,
but a lot of times they are still living people.
(06:27):
Who are like a lot more publicly visible then she is,
and so if so and so is a leading academic
researcher who does public history all the time. Bl blah
blah blah. Like that's a different situation from like a
private citizen who was maintaining a pretty private life at
this point. Yeah, she has, he said in interviews like,
(06:48):
I like, I like my quiet life. Yeah, and I
don't want to mess with that. Um. I did notice
there was an interview she did with a butterfly group
where someone was asking how she viewed this whole thing,
and she is saying, you know, people got it wrong
for so long and it's getting better. But also I'm
I'm obviously not directly quoting, but basically like, because there
(07:10):
have now been decades of misinformation, it's really hard to
course correct for a lot of it, which is just
an interesting thing to consider. It's kind of like, I mean,
I wanted to include that aspect of it because we
talk all the time about how, you know, there are
versions of history that get completely inadvertently even or vertent
lye I don't know, um, you know, kind of written
(07:33):
in a way that eliminates key elements or key people
in them, and that was one and it was the
same reason that I wanted to include that discussion of
the fact that Petiver getting all of his amazing samples,
which are lauded still as being like such an incredible collection,
it's tied to really nefarious and not not rosy and
(07:57):
delightful people history. Yeah. Um. We always joked that every
piece of history we talked about is we always discover
is trace back to racism and slavery in many cases.
But I really had not thought about how much naturalist
and biological history and our knowledge was tied to the
(08:19):
slave trade until I read that paper, and then I
was like, oh yeah, and also in other parts of
the world like colonialism and right, yeah, yeah, yeah. The
good news is you can grow milk wheed at home, um,
which I ordered a bunch of And I literally while
I was working on this, I texted a bunch of
(08:41):
my friends. It was basically like, by the way, you're
all going to start growing milk wheat. I already ordered
seeds for everybody to be bossy, but the butterflies need us. Um.
I have had various stabs at growing uh flowers and
nectar plants for insects here in my yard with varying
degrees with success. But one of the things that I
(09:03):
will say, and if you if you go check out
um Monarch joint Venture dot org, which we mentioned at
the end of the podcast, they will link you to resources.
But one of the things that I did read multiple
times is that you should get local milkweed, like the
milkweed that naturally grows in your area, because a lot
of places sell tropical milkweed that will actually confuse sometimes
(09:26):
insects into thinking it's not time to move on. I
don't know if that's true. I'm not an entomologist, but
definitely like local is always better for your area if
you're trying to participate in a project like this um
so it's easy Piecy. You'll have some fun flowers and
then maybe you'll also get cute visitors who doesn't want that. Yeah,
(09:48):
it's interesting. One of the things that came up in
several articles, particularly in this last week where the extinction
endangered species listing was made UH is that several people
in the science community have noted like this is one
of the first species that a lot of people in
(10:08):
North America feel a natural connection to because they see
them in their yards. So hopefully the hope is that
one people will want to do, like take those simple
steps of like growing local flowering plants so that insects
in your area that are important to the whole biosphere
of your area will continue to thrive, but also that
(10:30):
it will kind of help people make a bigger connection
to conservation and to making bigger efforts towards conservation of
species that that they maybe don't have that personal connection to.
So that is my my hope, my hope, my hope.
If you start growing milkweed, send us pictures, tell us
all about it and about your success, because I'm very curious. Um,
(10:53):
I hope we all do such things because I think
that would be great. It's easy. You can even do
it in a planter. You don't have to have a
big tract of lamp. So hopefully will all improve things
and the butterflies will bounce back. I hope. Oh, Tracy,
(11:17):
we talked about Luigi this week. He was tricky for
me in some ways, which you discovered. There were parts
where I had started a sentence and just vanished during
that because I could there were things about his life
that I did not know how to describe in a
way that would be appropriate for our show, because he was,
(11:39):
as we talked about, a womanizer in a way that
had some very misogynist leanings. UM like. He at one
point in his autobiography talked about um offering lessons to
women who wanted to take photography lessons for their hobby,
and he wrote about them, quote, any woman who takes
up photography as a hobby has something emotionally lacking in
(12:02):
her life. She must be emotionally starved as I was.
So it's like this one too punch where he's like,
you wouldn't do this unless you you needed a thrill.
But I also understand because I needed a thrill. Like
it's a little He always has this kind of duality
where he is self deprecating at the same time he's
insulting other people, and I think in his head that
(12:23):
makes it okay. Um. I was pleasantly surprised though about
the ways that he championed in his writing, like not
making spectacles out of people who were different. He had
this very personal sense of right and wrong, and he
(12:44):
relays this one story in his his autobiography where he
was asked for photos of what this editor from another
magazine that was not New York called Abnormal Fellows, and
what he meant was men who wore women's clothing and
in it. In it, we Gi said that he called
(13:05):
that editor and said, you're not getting the pictures. What's
abnormal to you is completely normal to me. Like he
just was like, no, I'm not going to exploit somebody
for your thing. So he had this voyeuristic tendency, but
he was also really weirdly protective of of people in
the fringe of society. It's very, very fascinating. The New
(13:25):
Yorker had to write up about him, in which they
they put it succinctly and much better than I could,
where they described him as both exploitative and humane, which
is a weird, a weird combo, but it's part of
what makes him so fascinating to me. We mentioned his
photos of doctor Strange Love, and if you are doing
calendar math, you may go, wait a minute. Strange Love
(13:49):
didn't come out until the nineteen sixties. I don't know
what the scoop is there. It is always specifically mentioned
as a thing that happened when he was in Hollywood,
but he was back in New York before that. Happened,
So I don't know if it's like a thing where
And I saw that reported in multiple places, so I
wanted to mention it here because it is a little
(14:10):
bit weird. I'm not sure what the scoop is there,
unless he just got called back by Kubrick for that.
There's also an interesting side story story about his life
that when he was working in Acne, he was also
a fiddle player, and he started playing in a movie
theater orchestra huh for a while, and that he hated
(14:33):
talkies because once they became a thing and sound attached
to picture was more common, he couldn't do that job anymore,
which he apparently really loved, and he claimed that he
always hated talkies for the rest of his night. I
mean that seems like a logical grudge to hold. Yeah,
one other thing I wanted to mention because I'm sure
(14:54):
someone will ask he was Jewish. We didn't mention it
in the show because it's kind of like when we
talked about Theodo Vera, he would say things like, oh,
I took this holiday off, but he never talked about
actually observing any religious practices. It's unclear how connected he
was to that as part of his identity versus like
(15:17):
those just being the few days he would take off
a year because he was a workaholic without question. You know.
He he both wrote about himself and it's corroborated by
other accounts that like there would be times when, for example,
like a gangster was expected to be arrested, and so
(15:38):
Press would start to camp out around that person's apartment
building and the other guys would take shifts, and Luigi
would just stay the whole time, Like even if it
took three days, he would not leave. Um, so he
kind of had a his circadian rhythms were different than
everyone else's. I'll just he could not handle the nine
to five day job situation. Uh. The other fun factoried
(16:02):
about him is that he estimates that in his time
at ACME, he took photographs of more than five thousand murders,
which is a lot. That's so many, it is so
many have conflicted feelings about all the crime scene photography. Yeah,
it's um, I mean it's like it's like we said,
(16:23):
he could be very exploitative and also very humane. It's
it's really interesting to me, especially like when you see
the ways he took those pictures is usually pretty unromanticized. Right,
it is a straight photo of like a corpse on
the ground. And then when he takes pictures of people
(16:45):
that were often outsiders, there is often a little bit
more of a loving warmer set up to them, which
you can see, like he feels a greater connection to outsiders. Right.
He even talks about like what other people found beautiful.
He rarely did. Like he talked when he was at
Vogue about finding models kind of like just weird. He
(17:07):
didn't understand them, they didn't seem to understand themselves. In
his opinion, he didn't find anything attractive about a model.
But he was perfectly happy to like meet girls on
the street and just be like, you want to get
in my car and then they would drive around for
a while and maybe hook up. It's a little bit
of a a strange thing, you know, Uigi. Some of
(17:31):
his pictures are so beautiful, some are so upsetting. There's
everything in between. If you go looking, know that you're
probably going to see some blood at minimum. Yeah. I
find the really distorted ones um un nerving. I don't
love them, but I don't know if it's because I,
you know, grew up and came to be interested in
(17:53):
photography and art at a time when he had been
so much before that. I had already seen that kind
of photo playing and editing kind of played out like
to the point where when I find it, when I
actually realized that I was looking at his work, I
was like seeing it. I mean, he you know, his
(18:15):
pictures of New York at night are the real, are
the real, like meat and potatoes of his his work,
and really like the ones that I think most people
find the most engaging versus his later stuff where he
was kind of it seems much more purposely trying to
figure out new ways to make pictures and to make
them interesting, versus just capturing what was interesting about any
(18:37):
given scene on its own. Anyway, that was weechie. If
you have time off this weekend, I hope you look
at some good art. It's just good for your soul.
If you don't have time off, I'm sorry, and I
hope that it is as RESTful as can being. That
you do find some moments of sawace, look at some
pretty art that makes you happy. Um, and I hope
all of your responsibilities play out as beautifully and ideally
(19:00):
as possible. Everybody be good to each other. You will
find us right back here tomorrow with a classic, and
then starting on Monday, we'll have new stuff for you.
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