For those attuned to the story of Joshua Norton’s December 1852 attempt to corner the San Francisco rice market, a Weimar-era song with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht and music by Hanns Eisler should harbor clear echoes.
The song, “Supply and Demand,” appears in Brecht’s play The Measures Taken (or The Decision) that first was performed in Berlin in December 1930.
The song is voiced by the character of the Trader, who opens the song with a meditation on his amoral effort to turn a profit on…rice.
This look at “Supply and Demand” includes audio and video of four recordings and performances of the song between 1965 and 2022.
Also included: A rare c.1920 advertising photograph showing Brecht with other key figures of Weimar popular culture.
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In 1984, Malcolm E. Barker published his little book, Bummer and Lazarus: San Francisco’s Famous Dogs, about the free-range canine friends and ratters of the early 1860s who were so beloved that the city’s Board of Supervisors exempted them from its severe dog-culling policy — and who subsequently were immortalized in cartoons of this period by Edward Jump and others.
The book includes Barker’s finding — since widely accepted — that there is no contemporaneous evidence supporting the persistent, wishful claim that Bummer and Lazarus were Emperor Norton’s dogs — rather, that the association between the Emperor and the dogs is just another of the many later apocryphal legends attaching to the Emp.
Sometime in the 13-year period between the publication of Barker’s book and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen’s death in 1997, Caen praised the book as “a wonderful addition to the shelf of Sanfriscana.”
But, for some four decades in the mid 20th century, Caen was among those who quietly but persistently gave oxygen to the urban myth that Emperor Norton owned Bummer and Lazarus.
Documented here are six examples from 1948 to 1985.
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In the 17 years since the San Francisco Chronicle noted in 2004 that the Emperor Norton Sundae no longer was on the menu at the Ghirardelli ice cream shop in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square, the conventional wisdom has held that 2004 was when the “Emperor Norton” was removed.
But, I always have pointed out that 2004 is when the absence was noticed and reported as news — the removal itself could have happened earlier.
Turns out I was right. But, the cherry on top may be that the Emperor Norton Sundae has been hiding in plain sight at Ghirardelli — under a different name — for 20-plus years.
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