Pine Tree is to Apple Tree ~ as Anna Nicole is to Saul Steinberg (Part 1)
Two things sent my head spinning this morning. The first was the word “pineapple,” which is of course made up of “pine” and “apple.” The second was an email spam with the subject “lookin for horses”. That’s enough inspiration to write a post about a New Yorker cover artist and Anna Nicole Smith.
I spend a lot of time ranting to myself about why we’re bombarded by crazy island and beach images and why we want to make Cincinnati feel more like Waikiki. The two towns already share three “i”s. What more do they need?
Today I’ve been obsessing about the reverse: what happened when the European explorers started floating all over the place and pushing their ideas and religions on the remote islands and what did they observe? A lot really. But there’s this middle ground, too, where the two (broadly defined) cultures started mixing together. Those Euros and missionaries started having a little too much fun.
“Pineapple” became my word of the day because of a 1998 documentary mini-series that I’ve been watching on DVD called The Life of Birds with David Attenborough. The mechanisms that pine cones use to protect their seeds came up in one of the episodes and sent me thinking about the visual similarities between the cones and the pineapple, which obviously led to the name “pineapple” in English. Or did it?
Many other cultures call pineapples “ananas,” which has three “a”s and is thus probably used in Cincinnati also. The Latin name is Ananas comosus. Saul Steinberg called it “the dragon of fruits.” There are many interesting things about this dragon.
Strangely enough, the word pineapple was actually used to describe pine cones many centuries ago, and it wasn’t until the word began to be used to describe the tropical fruit even centuries later that it was abandoned for the conifers, which later become known as pine cones. So it wasn’t like the Brits arrived on the Pacific islands and said, “Oh, look at those pine-cone-like fruits growing there on the ground!”
Oddly enough, while most people would probably guess Hawaii as the place of origin of the pineapple, the fruit isn’t even originally from an island. Pineapples are native to South America and were carried to the West Indies and Central America by native peoples. Columbus found the fruit on his early voyages and took it with him as scurvy protection, which makes me wonder why if we JOKINGLY call Brits “limeys” why we don’t call the Spaniards “pineys” (yes, I know Columbus was Italian). The Spanish may have also taken it on to some of the islands to cultivate, including Hawaii. This somehow brings us to the transplanted human Saul Steinberg and this image:
This is the pineapple image that has been perplexing me most the past couple of weeks. Steinberg was a cartoonist/illustrator who has worked with the New Yorker for many years. This book on the “Illuminations” exhibit was sitting in a discounted book rack at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., a pretty building with entrances flanked with potted palms in the warmer months. Here’s a review of the exhibit from Mark Stevens at New York magazine.
The first thing that I thought about this cover was, “What editor made the decision to put a big pineapple on a big book created for an important artist/illustrator when there were so many other works available?” Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful image, and you can totally see how Steinberg, who was at one point a student of architecture, uses architectural drawing techniques to alter the scale of the dragon fruit to fit the view of New York magazine’s Stevens’ statement that Steinberg creates “off-kilter urban landscape.” He also shrinks down the Picasso-esque Don-Quixote-like figure on the horse. Is this person ready to slay the pineapple? Could it be Anna Nicole?
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Posted on September 13, 2007
Filed Under Food and Drink, Health and Wellness, Islands, Urbanity | 2 Comments
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