Q: Why did King Kong climb the Empire State Building?
A: He was too big to fit in the elevator.
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It is possible to get a Hi and Lois panel (or any online image) into Blogger using an iPad, like so: Take screenshot. Download TouchUp Lite (free image-editor) and crop screenshot. Upload resulting picture to Picasa. Add appropriate URL to draft.
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In Pittsburgh, Leena’s Food is a tiny restaurant that serves great Middle Eastern food. Mohammed Issa’s claim to have the best falafel in the city — and perhaps anywhere — is easy to believe.
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In Manhattan, Maharaja Palace has an excellent lunch buffet. But the restaurant is small and needs to turn its tables: if you linger over lunch and then decide to stay on for tea, you’ll be warned that the preparation will take a very long time. Or at least we were so warned. (Is it sun tea they’re making?)
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For those on the road, Whole Foods is a good choice for a quick lunch or dinner. Go to the Prepared Foods sector and grab a cardboard receptacle and some cutlery.
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William Buehler Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929), a study of Haitian Vodou, has illustrations by Alexander King. Seabrook seems to have been a scary man. Our friend Margie King Barab was married to Alex.
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By the way, Elaine has written several posts about the composer Seymour Barab (Margie’s husband). Elaine knew Seymour for several years (via correspondence and phone calls) before we all met face to face. (But I knew that already.)
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Dorothy Wegman Raphaelson was one of the last two surviving Ziegfeld Girls. She was married to playwright and screenwriter Samuel Raphaelson (who appears in this 2009 post). A photograph of DWR on her hundredth birthday shows her elegant and joyful in Central Park.
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At the theater, Al Hirschfeld sketched without looking, using a pad and pencil in his pocket.
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Hirschfeld’s pink townhouse (122 East 95th Street) is for sale: $5,295,000. No, it’s sold.
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The exhibition “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde” has two paintings I’ve long wanted to see: Juan Gris’s Flowers (1914) and Marie Laurencin’s Apollinaire and His Friends (1909). Gris’s painting (from a private collection) plays a part in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923). (But I knew that already.)
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Seeing Flowers itself makes clear what reproductions barely suggest: the work is largely a collage; its flowers are cut and pasted. Now I better understand what Joseph Cornell might have seen in Gris’s work.
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“The Steins Collect” is a reminder of the ugly, often despicable cultural and political attitudes of early-twentieth-century modernists. How did Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas manage to remain in France and get through the Second War? Here is a dossier on the matter, with various points of view. My two cents: calling Stein’s relationship to Vichy “complex” and “complicated” (words that appear and reappear in the work of Stein’s defenders) is not persuasive. That Stein was sympathetic to fascism and enjoyed the friendship and protection of the collaborator Bernard Faÿ seems to me to make it relatively easy to think things through.
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“The Steins Collect” is also a reminder of the role money plays in art: Americans abroad, income from rental properties, things to buy. Money, money, money.
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Roy Peter Clark’s The Glamour of Grammar (2011) looks like it might be a helpful book in teaching writing.
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The bookstore where Harvey Pekar takes Anthony Bourdain in the Cleveland episode of No Reservations? Zubal Books.
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Manhattan’s “secret bookstore,” Brazenhead Books, the subject of a short 2011 film, is a great used-book store, a store in which every book is a good one (or better than good). Our greatest finds: two books by Alex King, and a third that he illustrated. Talk about luck.
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The arranger and composer Nelson Riddle attended Ridgefield Ridgewood High School in New Jersey. (Jonathan Schwartz got it wrong.)
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New Jersey is benighted. In an effort to save money, the state has turned off many of its highway lights. It feels strange and at least slightly dangerous to be parsing overhead signage in the dark. I feel sorry for the unfortunate traveler who does not already know the way.
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Elaine’s great-grandfather was a forest assayer in Russia and a presser in a tailor’s shop in Philadelphia.
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The instruments in the Frederick Historic Piano Collection might change one’s sense of “the piano”: these instruments differ greatly in tone from the modern piano and from one another. The collection is the work of Elaine’s elementary-school music teacher and her husband. One piano’s sound reminded us of the massive Beckwith upright in our collection. (That piano is our collection.)
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A corkscrew is also known as a “wine key.”
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The Vinturi is a small device that aerates wine, making a marked difference in taste and aroma.
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Winemakers use isinglass to clarify, uhh, wine.
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Jiro Dreams of Sushi (dir. David Gelb, 2011) is a beautifully filmed meditation on work and happiness. In this film, they are one. Jiro Ono: “I feel ecstatic all day. I love making sushi.”
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Gloria Swanson’s thirty-two-room Englewood, New Jersey villa was called Gloria Crest. The house was named not for Swanson but for the wife of the Polish noble who built it in 1926. My dad did tile work there, after Swanson’s time.
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Prescient may be pronounced in surprising ways. The American Heritage Dictionary gives four pronunciations:
prĕsh′ ənt, -ē-ənt, prē′ shənt, -shē-əntI appreciate knowing (finally) that there’s a sh sound in prescient.
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Did you know that you can listen to episodes of the radio serial Dragnet in podcast form?
Episodes — you mean whole ones?
That’s right, complete episodes.
Start to finish?
That’s right.
And you say they’re available as a podcast?
Yeah, that’s right, a podcast. Free too.
Well then, it seems that there’s only one thing to do.
What’s that?
Listen.
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It is a great gift to have friends from other generations. (But I knew that already.)
More things I learned on my summer vacation
2011 : 2010 : 2009 : 2008 : 2007 : 2006
[Summer: the time between the spring and fall semesters, regardless of season.]
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