Blasts from the Past: 40 Overlooked Masters Who Still Stire our Souls

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Julia Morgan (1872?1957)
According to legend, William Randolph Hearst plucked Julia Morgan out of obscurity and set her to work designing the strange, vast, faux-Spanish mansion in San Simeon, California, that came to be known as Hearst Castle. Not so. The architect had been the first woman admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (after two years of trying); then she?d established a thriving practice in California that (thanks in part to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) eventually produced nearly 800 buildings. (Web site: www.hearstcastle.org) ?Joseph Hart

Ladies Against Women (LAW) (founded 1981)
They gained widespread notice at the 1984 Republican convention when, dressed as ?50s housewives, these satirical Ladies (and a few cross-dressed men) waved banners reading ?Born to Clean? and ?Ban the Poor.? Under the direction of their always ladylike leader, Mrs. Chester Cholesterol (Gail Ann Williams), the San Francisco?
based performance-art pranksters wreaked polite havoc during the Reagan era, demanding repeal of women?s suffrage (?Suffering, not suffrage, keeps us on our pedestals?) and abolition of the environment (?It takes up too much space, and is almost impossible to keep clean?). (Web site: www.well.com/user/gail/ladies) ?Laine Bergeson

Plastic People of the Universe (founded 1968)
A lot of rock bands have sung about
revolution, but the Plastic People of the Universe actually helped bring one about. All hopped up on smuggled Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground records, the dissident Czech experimentalists jammed their way into history as the house band of Czechoslovakia?s emerging ?velvet revolution.? Harassed, banned, and sometimes imprisoned, they persevered until their friend, avant-garde playwright Vaclav Havel, became president. Now that?s rock and roll. (Book: The Plastic People of the Universe, ed. by Jaroslav Riedel; Mat?a, 1999)
?Keith Goetzman

Mildred Wirt Benson (Carolyn Keene) (1905?2002)
An accidental foremother of grrl power, Benson was the original author of the Nancy Drew novels, writing under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. She eventually penned 23 sagas of the plucky, resourceful, and cool-headed young sleuth. Though she denied any political agenda as a writer (?I don?t align [Nancy] with the feminist movement,? she insisted), Benson herself was a living example of empowered womanhood; she flew airplanes into her 80s and once got lost alone in the Amazon jungle. She set precedents as a businesswoman, too, leaving the series during the Depression because she wouldn?t work for reduced pay from the publisher. (Books: Nancy Drew series published by Aladdin Paperbacks)
?Laine Bergeson

d.a. levy (1942?1968)
Proudly lower-case like e.e. cummings, levy was Cleveland?s wild man of poetry in the 1960s. A supercharged cross between William Blake and Lenny Bruce, levy wrote blazing visionary verse, created dense collages, published an underground paper called The Buddhist Third-Class Junkmail Oracle, and did everything he could to scandalize Ohio authorities and prove that the fires of revolt burned bright in flyover country. (Book: The Buddhist Third-Class Junkmail Oracle: The Art and Poetry of d.a. levy, ed. by Mike Golden; Seven Stories, 1999)
?Jon Spayde

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print