W2 on the screen

[From More Than a Secretary (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1936). Click for a larger view.]

Maizie West (Dorothea Kent) to Carol Baldwin (Jean Arthur): “Miss Baldwin, are there two v s in liver ?”

That’s a Webster’s New International Dictionary , second edition, often called the W2. You can see one in color, marbled edges and all, here.

Other Merriam-Webster sightings
A Webster’s Collegiate used as a weapon : Timmy and Lassie and an W2

“Before paper and scissors”

From The Far Side : “Before paper and scissors.”

Pleasure-domes

A clue in the Newsday Saturday Stumper — “Less-than-stately pleasure dome” — gave me a new way to think about Citizen Kane . The answer, SNOWGLOBE, made me realize that Charles Foster Kane’s snow globe is something of a pleasure-dome within a pleasure-dome, one enclosed world within another, a Xanadu within a Xanadu. And just as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s full vision of Xanadu is beyond recovery, so too is the world represented by Kane’s snow globe.

If I were a certain kind of person, and I guess I am, I might go further and suggest that the pleasure-dome of Kane’s snow globe is a substitute for what might be called the primal pleasure-dome: not the maternal breast (which doesn’t enclose) but the all-providing world of the amniotic sac. When the water breaks, that world is lost. No wonder Kane’s snow globe breaks when it falls to the floor of his bedroom.

I couldn’t leave this idea sitting in a comment, could I?

[Coleridge’s prose introduction to “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream,” an almost certainly apocryphal account of the poem’s composition, may be found here. It should accompany any printing of the poem. And in case anyone needs to see, the snow globe appears at two other points in Citizen Kane .]

Domestic comedy

[Two pairs of reading glasses, mine, were on the sofa. Elaine noticed.]

“You know what those are? Twin frames.”

[Context: we binged the twin Amazon and Netflix series, Escaping Twin Flames and Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe. Multi-level-marketing madness.]

Sand, slag, coal, crime, lunch

[123-133 Varick Avenue, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

From industrial Brooklyn, a composite of Brooklyn industry: [Unreadable] Repair Co., Evergreen Sand Company, The Slag Company of America, Vijax Coal, and Gates Coal. And up front, what looks like a ramshackle luncheonette.

The Vijax Coal Company was the site of two robberies in 1938, crimes committed in the course of a gruesome four-man spree:

[“Gang Seized Here For 3 Kidnappings: Hoover Implicates 4 Suspects in Robberies Also.” The New York Times, November 2, 1938.]

The kidnapping victims: an executive of a White Plains sand and gravel company, murdered before a ransom was arranged; the owner of a Brooklyn coal company; and the son of the owner of a Manhattan stevedoring company. Those two men were released after their families paid ransoms. One must wonder what prompted the perpetrators to go after sand, gravel, coal, and stevedoring. The Times reported that two of the men responsible were executed in 1940. A third received a fifty-year sentence. The fourth culprit, who testified against his three cronies, received a suspended sentence.

On a happier note: a second WPA photograph gives a better look at Marty’s Luncheonette. If wonder if the photographers were brave enough to eat there.

[137–57 Varick Street? The numbering here seems off. Click for a larger view.]

[Click for a larger view.]

Today a massive recycling operation stands where these businesses once stood: Cooper Recycling, which described as “the largest construction and demolition debris recycling facility in NYC.” It’s women-owned and family-run.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

A metaphor for a presidency

From the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American :

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become a metaphor for the Trump presidency....

Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.”

And as Richardson says, “not only is the reflecting pool defying [the current occupant’s] narrative, so are Iran and Israel.”

Father’s Day

Happy Father’s Day to all.

A joke in the traditional manner, à la my dad, who was making dad jokes long before they were called dad jokes:

Why did the girl put a shoe on her face?

No spoilers; the answer is in the comments. Joke approved by three beta testers.

Related reading
All OCA jokes in the traditional, non-traditional, and neo-traditional manners

[Merriam-Webster dates dad joke to 1987.]

Florence Price’s “Adoration” in Vienna

The Vienna Philharmonic, under the direction of Lorenzo Viotti, plays Elaine’s arrangement of Florence Price’s “Adoration” (a piece written for organ), June 19, in Vienna.

Elaine has written something about it too.

[Elaine, wow.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell, and it’s quite a challenge. I had to move to the online puzzle and use autocheck, letter by letter, to get the last few words. The one that really flummoxed me: 33-D, eight letters, “The Howling villains,” though in retrospect I can see that the clue is clueful.

Three clue-and-answer pairs that delighted me:

16-A, nine letters, “Snail mail and dumb phones.” I immediately thought of another, though I don’t buy it.

18-A, thirteen letters, “Honeyed bunch.” I thought first of cereal, which I think the clue wanted me to think.

36-A, twelve letters, “Query of the convinced.” Clever: why would someone who’s convinced ask a question?

My favorite in this puzzle: 52-A, nine letters, “Less-than-stately pleasure dome.” It gave me a new way to think of a scene in a movie.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

About that music

That is, the music at the dedication ceremony for the Obama Presidential Center. I thought the performances by Jennifer Hudson, Marc Anthony, and Stevie Wonder were electrifying. Bono, Eddie Vedder: I cried uncle.

I know that the music for this event was not chosen with Elaine or me in mind. However.

Conspicuously missing from an event held on the South Side of Chicago: any trace of blues or jazz. “Sweet Home Chicago” by Buddy Guy or a rousing rendition of Sonny Rollins’s “St. Thomas” (by anyone) might have sufficed. (I would not expect a journey into the world of the AACM.) Also conspicuously missing: any trace of so-called classical music. Elaine and I each thought of Florence Price, the black American composer who lived on the South Side for decades, and whose short composition “Adoration” has become well known as a deeply moving and infinitely adaptable piece of music. It's being performed by the Vienna Philharmonic tonight to mark Juneteenth. It’s good to now know that something by Price (“Adoration”?) is on the program for an orchestra concert at the Obama center in July.

There’s no easy way to contact the center with suggestions for future programming. So I'll just yell as loudly as I can: some blues and jazz, please.

Elaine has some thoughts too.

[Buddy Guy performed at the White House in 2012. Obama honored Sonny Rollins with the National Medal of Arts in 2011.]