Stumper redux

Good news for Newsday Saturday Stumper fans, in an e-mail from crossword editor Stan Newman:

Beginning in late spring there’ll be an occasional Saturday with “the ‘good old meanness’ of before.” Stan is also thinking about creating a weekly non-Newsday puzzle of Stumper difficulty.

And if enough people are interested, he’ll create Stumpers of the Year collections as .puz files, $14.88 a year. The explanation of the price: Stan began with Newsday in 1988; the collections will begin with 2014. If you’re interested, send an e-mail to with “Stumpers of the Year” in the subject line.

[E-mail address encoded with email-encoder.com.]

“A marvelous Rembrandt”

In Doncières, the narrator stands in the dark, looking into lighted windows.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Merriam-Webster has niello, noun and verb.]

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword, by Stan Newman, is a tough puzzle. As I worked at it, I though, Wait a minute, this puzzle is supposed to be easier than a Saturday Stumper. But this puzzle was comparable to a Stumper in difficulty. Not a lot of trickiness, but an awful lot of indirection. 20-D, five letters, “Official endorsements”? 25-A, four letters, “Office initials”? I had no idea, until I did.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

9-D, five letters, “Soprano line opener.” Clever.

17-A, eight letters, “Flag-capturing game.” I am surprised to see that this game is still around — the answer feels dowdy to me. Quick, to the rec room!

22-A, three letters, “‘Inside‘ amenity.” I was thinking it must be something for A-listers. Silly me.

55-D, four letters, “In the bag, perhaps.” The clue redeems the answer.

61-D, three letters, “He’s old-fashioned, ultimately.” Shades of the Stumper!

And my three favorites:

8-D, fifteen letters, “Diner menu listing that can’t be ordered.” Maybe obvious to some, but new to me. And I like anything with a diner in it.

35-A, “Theft insurance of a sort.” The other fifteen-letter answer in the puzzle. A useful reminder for those who need one.

58-A, eight letters, “Naval enlistee.” I admit it: I had to do some rethinking to see the plainly obvious answer.

One clue-and-answer I have to take issue with: 44-D, six letters, “Stradivari, secondarily.” No, he was not.

January 31: Good news: the Stumper is not gone forever. See this post.

Deadpan reportage

From a New York Times article about Lenka Perron, a one-time believer who found her way out of QAnon:

Mr. Trump himself was a source of doubt. Q presented him as a brilliant mastermind, and for a while she accepted that. But it became harder to reconcile that persona with what she observed in real life.

Sonny Fox (1925–2021)

Newsday has an obituary. And from last year, a brief interview. And here, from Montclair State University, is an extended look at Sonny Fox’s life and work, which included much more than Wonderama.

Raise your hand if you remember Wonderama.

Sardines and gin

Once unpacked, so to speak, the headline makes sense: “Popular Tin of Sardines gin bar to open in former Roker toilet block.”

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

A Gris collage

At The New York Times, Jason Farago offers a close reading of Juan Gris’s Still Life: The Table.

[If I were teaching William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, this Times feature would be doing some of the work for me.]

Cicely Tyson (1924–2021)

Cicely Tyson, in a recent interview with The New York Times: “When I smile, I smile. I do not grin. There’s a difference, OK?” The Times has an obituary.

Cicely Tyson’s third appearance on television was in an episode of Naked City.

“Orange-colored envelope”

Mme de Guermantes: the narrator seeks to know “the mystery of her name,” which is not to be discerned when he sees her leaving her house or riding in her carriage.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002).

I love the way what “my father’s friend had said” becomes, “after all,” the measure of objectivity. Proust is unsparingly comic in his presentation of a younger self.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Cloris Leachman (1926–2021)

The most abiding image: as Phyllis Lindstrom in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The most striking: as Christina Bailey, running down the highway in nothing but a trenchcoat in Kiss Me Deadly. The strangest: as Ruth Martin in Lassie, pre-June Lockhart. Jon Provost: “Cloris did not feel particularly challenged by the role.”

The New York Times has an obituary.

Recently updated

An unambiguous forecast Now with a reply from the National Weather Service.

An unambiguous forecast

From a National Weather Service alert for our area:

Between 1 and 2 inches of snow is expected by supper time today.

Do you see what they did there? For some people dinner is a mid-day meal; for others, an evening meal. Supper leaves no ambiguity. Merriam-Webster explains both words.

Now I want to know whether the NWS uses supper regionally or nationally.

Idle question, Michael, let it go.

*

I know myself too well to know that I could leave the question alone. So I e-mailed the Central Illinois office of National Weather Service to ask. Chris Geelhart, lead meteorologist, replied:

The forecaster that issued that statement comes from a farming background in the Midwest, which is probably why he used that wording. My mom also comes from a farming background (in South Dakota) and would use similar wording when I was growing up. Typically we tend to lean toward using actual clock times or more broad terms such as “mid afternoon”, “early evening”, etc. The NWS doesn't have a formal policy on regional terminology, as far as I know.

Chris noted that the use of supper in this morning’s alert was a subject of conversation on social media.

And it’s snowing.

[Thanks to Chris Geelhart for permission to quote him here.]

Time as money

From Innovation Hub, a remarkable story about selling the correct time: “A Watch Named Arnold.”

A magazine exhibition

From the Grolier Club, “Magazines and the American Experience: Highlights from the Collection of Steven Lomazow, M.D.” Many covers to admire. Maybe my favorite: the September 1929 Black Mask, which began the serial publication of The Maltese Falcon.

The Grolier Club has a dozen more exhibitions online. Happy browsing.

“Dead Man Teaching”

The Chronicle of Higher Education tells the story of a Concordia University course: “Dead Man Teaching.” Unconscionable, Concordia.

What most galls me: for the university, it doesn’t seem to matter if the professor is living or dead. Who cares? It’s not like a student would want to e-mail a professor with a follow-up question, right?

Full disclosure

The e-mail’s subject line read Glasses Disclosure. I didn’t see the sender’s name.

Full disclosure: I wear glasses. They disclose to me a world that, at a distance, would otherwise be blurred.

If J.D. Salinger’s unpublished stories about the Glass family are ever published, they would constitute a Glasses disclosure.

And there’s a Bud Powell composition, “Glass Enclosure.”

All or none of these observations might have something to do with my dream mail.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

“Apple Beige”

“This beige ushered in personal computing, which eventually helped change the world”: Ben Zotto goes in search of “Apple Beige.”

For me that color will always mean dysentery. In other words, playing The Oregon Trail with my children on the public library’s Apple IIe. At home we had a //c, whose color was a beautiful cream.

Terence Davies adapts Zweig

Exciting news: Terence Davies will direct an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novel The Post-Office Girl.

Our household has seen two Davies films: The Long Day Closes (1992) and Of Time and the City (2008). They’re reason to think that The Post-Office Girl is something to look forward to.

Related reading
All OCA Stefan Zweig posts (Pinboard)

Naked City Mongol

[Joe Silver as “Dean of Admissions.” From the Naked City episode “No Naked Ladies in Front of Giovanni’s House!” (April 17, 1963). Click for a larger view.]

I dunno. Maybe they used the same pencil from episode to episode. At any rate, there it is in the cup, a Mongol.

On the second shelf, the fourth book from the right looks like it might be a volume from the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books series. In a dean’s office?

Like every other Naked City episodes, this one is at YouTube. Not one of the best, but it does afford the chance to see Harry Guardino, Marisa Pavan, and Christopher Walken.

Venn reading
All OCA Mongol posts : Mongol and Naked City posts : Naked City posts (Pinboard)

Everything changes

A question for non-smokers and ex-smokers only: when did you last see an ashtray? Meaning a traditional tabletop ashtray, not the enormous outdoor kind. My answer: I can’t even remember.

Leaving Mar-a-Lago

From CNN:

Many once-loyal members of Mar-a-Lago are leaving because they no longer want to have any connection to former President Donald Trump, according to the author of the definitive book about the resort.

“It's a very dispirited place,” Laurence Leamer, historian and author of Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace, told MSNBC host Alex Witt on Weekends with Alex Witt Saturday. He said members are “not concerned about politics and they said the food is no good.”

It sounds like Mar-a-Lago may be turning into a latter-day Xanadu. Jigsaw, anyone?

The Blogger Quick Edit tools

The pencil icon that allowed for quick edits to Blogger posts and widgets disappeared a few days ago, along with the tools icon for editing widgets. But there are ways to get them back. Two posts from Adam at Too Clever by Half, this one and this one, explain.

I took what looked like the path of least resistance: I downloaded the Mac app Cascadea (new to me, $2.99) and created a Blogger Tools style for my blog, typing in my URL and one line of code:

.item-control {display:initial;}

You can also restore the Quick Edit tools so that they display (in unusable form) on any Blogger blog. That change makes it possible to once again delete comments that you’ve left on other blogs while logged into Blogger.

An ideal fix would have the Quick Edit tools visible on your blog alone, and only when you’re logged in and can use them. But to paraphrase Salzberg’s Theory of Pizza, it’s better to have a pencil you don’t want (or can’t use) than to want a pencil you don’t have.

Having just spent more than half an hour trying to figure out how to get Blogger to display side-by-side images with wraparound text, I will agree with Too Clever by Half that Google continues to make Blogger more difficult to use.

January 25: The Quick Edit tools are back. But to have them available in Safari, you have to allow cross-site tracking. (The setting is under the Privacy tab in Safari Preferences.) I’d rather not have cross-site tracking, so I’m going to use the Cascadea modification and just get used to seeing the tools all the time. It’ll be like living in a home workshop.

More about masks

More about masks, from NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, “Not All Masks Are Created Equal: How To Choose The Safest Mask For You,” an interview with Jeremy Howard, a research scientist at the University of San Francisco. Howard is a co-founder of Masks4All.

See also “Why Aren’t We Wearing Better Masks?” by Howard and Zeynep Tufecki (The Atlantic).

A related post
Double-masking

Double-masking

In The New York Times, a suggestion to double-mask:

Double-masking is a sensible and easy way to lower your risk, especially if circumstances require you to spend more time around others — like in a taxi, on a train or plane, or at an inauguration.

I have it from an informed source that double-masking is standard practice for many doctors and nurses: better mask underneath, cheap paper mask on top. Toss the cheap mask, and let the better mask sit in sunlight before using again.

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword, by Matthew Sewell, is not a Stumper. But it’s not that easy either. I started with an answer that I knew had to be right: 15-D, ten letters, “Bound to happen.” I was almost right, right enough to get a few (correct) answers and catch my mistake. I still think my mistaken answer fits the clue better.

Some clue and answer pairs I especially liked:

7-D, four letters, “Close watch.” The answer should have been obvious, and yet it wasn’t.

14-D, ten letters, “Sit-downs.” A nice clash of diction between clue and answer. “Sit-downs” makes me think of Tony Soprano and company. The answer, not so much.

16-A, four letters, “It may be nursed in a nursery.” Aww.

19-A, three letters, “Gull or rook.” Good birdplay.

A clue whose answer I find unconvincing: 65-A, ten letters, “‘Dinner is served’ sight.” Does anyone really say those ten letters? I may need to travel in better circles. Or these days, any circles. Or any shapes.

My favorite clue in this puzzle: 63-A, ten letters, “What those who have had it have.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Hank Aaron and Peanuts

For two weeks in August 1973, Peanuts devoted its daily (non-Sunday) strip to Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Snoopy. You can start on Wednesday, August 8, and read through to Wednesday, August 22.

Here’s some context: “Hammerin’ Hank’s 715th Home Run” (Fishwrap). And the New York Times obituary for Aaron.

Thanks to Stefan Hagemann for pointing me to this moment in baseball, comics, and culture.

Naked City Mongol

[Frank Gorshin, Charles Tyner, and a Mongol. From the Naked City episode “Beyond This Place There Be Dragons” (January 30, 1963). Click for a larger view.]

The Mongol seems to be the official pencil of the Naked City, showing up in a number of episodes.

“Beyond This Place There Be Dragons” is one of my favorite Naked City episodes. You can watch this episode, and every other Naked City episode, at YouTube.

Venn reading
All OCA Mongol posts : Mongol and Naked City posts : Naked City posts (Pinboard)

Time passing

From the Murphy Brown episode “Midnight Plane to Paris” (November 9, 1992). Murphy (Candice Bergen) to her son Avery: “A baby’s brain doesn’t even recognize time has passed. You’re kind of like the Beach Boys that way.”

The worst

Writing in The Atlantic, Tim Naftali, historian, says it’s Donald Trump**:

As a result of his subversion of national security, his reckless endangerment of every American in the pandemic, and his failed insurrection on January 6, one thing seems abundantly clear: Trump is the worst president in the 232-year history of the United States.

With all the necessary comparisons.

“Who? Me?”

The narrator is walking with the painter Elstir who — guess what? — is a friend of “the little band,” “the little gang of girls” whose remote beauty fascinates the narrator. Several of the girls come into view at the end of an avenue. Trusting that Elstir will make an introduction, the narrator turns his back, and stoops to look in the window of an antique shop, “as though fascinated by something.”

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Today

President Joe Biden: “This is democracy’s day.”

And: “Democracy has prevailed.”

Yes, and yes.

It's getting dusty in here

In every corner of our living room. Maybe yours too.

Wrong way

As the Frank Sinatra recording of “My Way” came to an end, Air Force One took off. Well, there’s at least something a Trump** administration can coordinate — even if the farewell spectacle itself started late.

I will think of that “My Way” as the last public evidence of the Trump** presidency. And it’s perfectly characteristic: unlimited ego and grandiosity, tempered by not a trace of self-awareness, joined to an utter poverty of intelligence and imagination. I know, let’s use “My Way”!

“My Way” was preceded by (among others) the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” and Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.”

Uh-oh

“We will be back in some form.”

Stranger Things?

A cover for today

[Barry Blitt, “A Weight Lifted,” The New Yorker, January 25, 2021. Click for a larger weight.]

Gives new meaning to the words “bird droppings.”

Drop him anywhere. In the nearest ocean perhaps.

The New Yorker has a brief feature on this cover and other Blitt Trump** covers.

Humanity in a president-elect

President-elect Joe Biden, speaking a little while ago in Wilmington, Delaware:

”My colleagues in the Senate used to always kid me for quoting Irish poets. They thought I did it because I’m Irish. I didn’t do it for that reason; I did it because they’re the best poets in the world.

“James Joyce was said to have told a friend that when it comes his time to pass, when he dies, he said, ‘Dublin [long pause], Dublin will be written on my heart.’ Well, excuse the emotion, but when I die, Delaware will be written on my heart, and the hearts of all of us, all the Bidens.”

[My transcription, from watching again at C-SPAN. One source for the Joyce quotation: Ulick O’Connor, Oliver St John Gogarty (1964).]

“Think only pleasant thoughts”

[Life, March 21, 1969. Click for larger muffins.]

In his book Class: A Guide through the American Class System (1983), Paul Fussell got it wrong:

If you merchandise tasteless little blobs of dough, you can sell billions of them by calling them “English” muffins.

Thomas’ English Muffins are not tasteless, nor are they blobs. They are a pleasant thought, though I really want to add a terminal s to Thomas’. To “keep right on going,” muffins no end, breakfast to midnight — that might be pleasant thought, though expensive.

English Muffin pizzas are, for me, a madeleine, though the ones I remember from childhood run along these lines. That’s right — ketchup and American cheese. The ketchup should go under the cheese. Madeleines come in many flavors.

I still like English Muffin pizzas, with pizza sauce, please. But hold the mozzarella. Only American cheese will do.

Knowing of

M. Bloch senior, dropper of names:

But the fact was that the only famous people whom M. Bloch knew were those he knew of, people whom, “without being acquainted with them,” he had seen in the distance at the theater or about town.

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Skip James, not so much:

He was the opposite of the blues name-dropper, when asked about the fabled Mississippi bluesmen Rube Lacy and Kid Bailey (both of whom he had met), he would say “I know of  Rube Lacy,” or “I know of  Kid Bailey,” and fail to elaborate.

Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (New York: Da Capo, 1994).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard) : Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James

Pen wipers

[Nancy, June 11, 1955. Click for a larger view.]

No seamstress, she.

Webster’s Second has it as penwiper : “any device to wipe a pen.” The word is gone from the Third. Here’s a brief history of penwipers, pen-wipers, and pen wipers.

Yesterday’s Nancy is today’s Nancy.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

MLK

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929.

[“Martin Luther King’s study, Dexter Parsonage Museum, Montgomery, Alabama.” Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith. 2010. From the George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Click for a larger view.]

A note from the Library of Congress:

The Dexter Parsonage Museum, historic home to twelve pastors of the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church from 1920-1992, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Martin Luther King lived in the home from 1954 to 1960.

The full-size 6432 × 4643 photograph at the Library of Congress website offers many details.

I’ll quote again words that I quoted at this time last year:

Perhaps the most determining factor in the role of the federal government is the tone set by the Chief Executive in his words and actions.

Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (1964).

[I think that my excitement in finding this photograph made it difficult for me to realize that the room must be a re-creation. A Montgomery website says that “The nine-room clapboard Parsonage, built in 1912, has been restored to its appearance when Dr. King and his family lived there. Much of the furniture presently in the the living room, dining room, bedroom and study was actually used by Dr. King.” But the books? The records?]

“Surf’s Up”

In today’s Atlantic crossword, by Peter Gordon, a nice tip of the hat: 10-D, nine letters, “Surf’s Up singers, with the.” Nice not to have to think of them as the in-name-only group sharing a stage with Vanilla Ice at Mar-a-Logo. The horror.

Surf’s Up is a 1971 album. “Surf’s Up” is a song, music by Brian Wilson, words by Van Dyke Parks, written for the ill-fated SMiLE project. It’s one of my favorite songs. Listen to the Brian-only version (1967). Then try the finished version. If you think you know what a song titled “Surf’s Up” is going to sound like — well, listen.

Help wanted

Annie Karni, writing in The New York Times: “The statement released Monday by Mrs. Trump was also rife with grammatical errors and typos.” Have you read it? Jeez.

I like this sentence from the Times article: “It was not clear who helped Mrs. Trump draft the statement.” Help!

“Hmmm, hmmm”

Robert de Saint-Loup’s handshake is stiff and distant. His uncle’s handshake is more distant still. Introducing Palamède, Baron de Charlus:

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

A Q believer

“She once spent several minutes explaining how a domino-shaped ornament on the White House Christmas tree proved that Mr. Trump was sending coded messages about QAnon, because the domino had 17 dots, and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet”: from a New York Times portrait of a Harvard-educated QAnon “digital soldier.”

Springfield 1908

From NBC News:

Illinois‘s two senators have called on President-elect Joe Biden to make the site of a 1908 race riot in Springfield a national monument.

Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin, both Democrats, wrote to Biden Thursday asking for the designation, citing the riot’s historic significance, especially its role in inspiring the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Wikipedia has an extensive article about the riot, which might be better described as racial terrorism.

Joanne Rogers (1928–2020)

“She was the inspiration for the puppet character Queen Sara, wife of King Friday XIII”: Joanna Rogers, Mrs. Rogers, pianist and Neighborhood advocate, has died at the age of ninety-two. The New York Times has an obituary.

Orange Crate Art is a Neighborhood-friendly zone.

Today’s Saturday somepin

Today’s Newsday crossword is not a Stumper. The Stumper is gone, replaced by somepin else, an easier themeless Saturday. Today’s puzzle is by Newsday puzzle editor Stan Newman, composing as Lester Ruff. Les Ruff, that is, easier, as every Newsday Saturday now promises to be. And this puzzle was easier, though it felt difficult. Is it a pseudo-Stumper? A semi-Stumper?

Some clue-and-answer pairs I enjoyed:

1-D, six letters, “California’s ‘Garlic Capital of the World.’” I love garlic, so I know the name. But probably anyone who’s bought garlic in an American supermarket has seen the name. The capital appears in Les Blank’s documentary Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers.

36-D, seven letters, “Papal, in Michelangelo’s day.” I learned something.

44-A, four letters, “Former Volvo alternative.” For me it signified (rightly or wrongly) Yuppie. Yuck.

67-A, six letters, “Feel like fighting.” But only because I misread the answer and felt mystified.

I didn’t find much 5-D, five letters, “Roy Lichtenstein ‘impactful’ pop-art painting” in today’s puzzle. Maybe next week’s Saturday will offer more.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Witness to the Siege

A conversation that aired last night on PBS, Witness to the Siege, with Judy Woodruff, Yamiche Alcindor, Lisa Desjardins, and Amna Nawaz.

Not a rhetorical question: Is there any one person who has done more to damage our country than Donald Trump**? Am I missing someone?

Opportunistic

My favorite sentence (so far) from Trevor Day’s Sardine (London: Reaktion, 2018): “Sardines are opportunistic.” Which means that “they feed on phytoplankton or zooplankton, or both, depending on which is abundant at the time.” Phytoplankton are plant-like organisms. Day characterizes zooplankton as “drifting animals.”

Opportunists and drifters: it sounds like ocean noir. Sooner or later, someone will be caught in a net.

Sardine is a volume in Reaktion’s Animal series, beautifully printed, with many drawings and photographs.

Thanks, Heber, for pointing me to this book.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

His ’n’ her resignations are in order

I have learned that “my” representative in the Illinois House, Chris Miller (R-110), husband of Mary Miller, attended the Washington, D.C. rally that was the prelude to last Wednesday’s attempted coup. He was streaming from the scene:

“We’re engaged in a great cultural war to see which worldview will survive, whether we will remain a free people, under free-market capitalism, or whether they will put us into the tyranny of socialism and communism and the dangerous Democrat terrorists that are trying to destroy our country.”

Chris Miller was most recently on my radar in August, when he denied the reality of the pandemic. As a photograph in Business Insider attests, he keeps his mask under his nose. Christ, what an airhole.

There’s a petition.

Related posts
January 5 and 6 in D.C., with Mary Miller : The objectors included Mary Miller : A letter to Mary Miller : Mary Miller, with no mask : Mary Miller, still in trouble

Mary Miller, still in trouble

Representative Jan Schakowsky (D, Illinois-9) will introduce a measure to censure fellow representative Mary Miller (R, Illinois-15). On January 5 Miller told a Moms for America rally in Washington that “Hitler was right on one thing — that whoever has the youth has the future.” She’s “my” representative in Congress.

Previous Miller posts
January 5 and 6 in D.C., with Mary Miller : The objectors included Mary Miller : A letter to Mary Miller : Mary Miller, with no mask

Small pleasures

I rarely watch the TV screen during commercials. Thus the first seconds of music in this Disaronno commercial tricked me into thinking that I was stepping into an episode of Golden Girls. I count two pleasures here: 1. the trick, and 2. my relief that I wasn’t in fact watching Golden Girls.

[No. 2 in a series. Here’s no. 1.]

Monocle, fluttering

Here comes Robert de Saint-Loup.

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Readers of Swann’s Way will remember the narrator’s interminable lengthy descriptions of individual monocles and their wearers, as seen by Charles Swann.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Keeping it local

From the Queens Daily Eagle, “Queens man impeached — again:

A Queens-born real estate developer made history Wednesday when he became the first U.S. president ever impeached twice by the House of Representatives.

The newspaper did a fine job with Trump**’s first impeachment:

He is the third president to be impeached in United States history — and the first from Queens.

Styling the name

On my blog he’s Trump*.

When he’s impeached a second time, he’ll be Trump**.

If he resigns, he’ll be          **. Self-erasure.

If removed, he’ll be Trump**.

If only the damage he’s done could be so easily erased or struck out.

Living, breathing

“Donald Trump is a living, breathing impeachable offense. It is what it is”: Hakeem Jeffries (D, New York-8), addressing the House minutes ago.

Outside and inside the Capitol

Here’s a photograph from Lauren Boebert’s Instagram account, said to have been posted on January 5. That’s Boebert (R, Colorado-3) front and center. Notice the four circled figures: I don’t need to explain their hand signal. See also this Washington Post article about what Mikie Sherrill (D, New Jersey-11) saw on January 5.

*

The Boebert photograph is not from January 5 and not from Washington. But it is a picture of Boebert with supporters, at least some of whom identify themselves as white supremacists. I trusted that Aaron Rupar’s (now-deleted) retweet of the photograph was evidence for its authenticity.

Evolution

A little context: The Princess of Luxembourg has come to spend a few weeks in Balbec. She’s a friend of the Marquise de Villeparisis, who herself is an old friend of the narrator‘s grandmother. When Mme de Villeparisis introduces grandmother and narrator to the Princess, the Princess looks at them with “loving sweetness.” The narrator feels as if he and his grandmother are about to be patted, like “a brace of docile animals poking our heads through the railings at the Zoo in the Bois de Boulogne.” The Princess buys candy and a loaf of rye bread, “the sort you feed to the ducks,” from the hawkers on the esplanade to give to her new acquaintances. And then the Princess offers her hand, to show she still has the common touch, and her expression is aimed “at not quite so lowly a level in the hierarchy of creatures.”

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Leave your best guess in a comment. I’ll drop a hint if needed.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Laurel and Proust

In the dining-room of the Grand-Hôtel at Balbec. The narrator’s grandmother wants to make sure that he has plenty of fresh air for his health. And for a moment, Proust’s novel turns into a Laurel and Hardy short.

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Translator’s note for Saint Blandine: “one of the first Christian martyrs in Gaul, put to death in Lyon in 177, remembered for her serenity under torture.”]

Yes, a coup

Fiona Hill explains that “Yes, It Was a Coup” (Politico):

There’s a standard coup “checklist” analysts use to evaluate coups. We can evaluate Trump’s moves to prevent the peaceful transfer of executive power against it. To successfully usurp or hold power, you need to control the military and paramilitary units, communications, the judiciary, government institutions, and the legislature; and mobilize popular support.

Let’s see how well this applies to what Trump has done.

A letter to Mary Miller

I’m sharing the text of a letter I’ve sent to my district’s representative in Congress, the representative now known on Twitter as #hitlerlady. She’s also made Boing Boing. She’s a disgrace, and she needs to go. If you’d like to sign the petition calling for her resignation, it’s here.

The Honorable Mary Miller
1529 Longworth House Office Building
United States House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Congresswoman Miller:

For the good of our district and our country, please resign. I see two reasons why you should.

1. Your invocation of Adolf Hitler suggests a glaring absence of moral awareness. Let’s look at your words, which you and your allies claim have been twisted:

“Each generation has the responsibility to teach the next generation. You know, if we win a few elections we’re still going to be losing unless we win the hearts of our children. It’s the battle. Hitler was right on one thing — that whoever has the youth has the future. Our children are being propagandized.”

First, you say that Hitler was right about something. There is no good reason to say that Hitler was right about something. There is no good reason to say that a murderous dictator was right about anything at all. My wife and I have managed to raise two children without ever turning to Hitler for parenting tips. Second, you invoke Hitler’s observation as the measure of what you believe you and your allies must do: engage in your own effort to make children think and act as you want. Your contorted and unconvincing apology for your words makes things worse still by likening to a Nazi anyone who holds views to the left of yours. And your assertion that you are pro-Israel makes things worse by suggesting that objections to your remarks are just a Jewish thing. Hitler’s cruelty and madness had many more targets than Jews. You don’t have to be Jewish to despise Hitler and think it’s disgraceful for a member of the United States Congress to say that Hitler was right about something. Comments on social media from your allies lead me to think that your apology is hardly genuine anyway.

As a practical matter, your assertion that “Hitler was right” damages our district, which is now known around the nation and around the world for your comments. As friends elsewhere ask, “Is she your representative?” Who would want to locate to a district whose representative in Congress says that “Hitler was right”? Oh, wait — I think I know.

2. Your willingness to go ahead with the effort to subvert the acceptance of the 2020 presidential election — even after the violence in Washington last Wednesday — suggests a disdain for the workings of our democratic republic. You may recall from philosophy what’s called the categorical imperative, the idea that one must act as one would have all others act. You have said that your purpose in objecting to the election results was to assure proper procedures in future elections. But what if all members of the House and Senate had acted as you did on Wednesday? The principle that elections are decided by voters would have been overturned, and democracy with it. To have objected for the sake of theater, to stir up “the base,” to please an unhinged president, while knowing that your minority position would make no difference to the outcome, is to have objected in bad faith, with the understanding that enough other people wouldn’t object. That’s a craven attitude to take in Congress or anywhere else.

I doubt that my words will have any influence on you, but I’m offering them anyway, in the spirit of the categorical imperative. I think that everyone should speak up.

And if you plan on serving out your term, please wear a mask around your fellow members of Congress.

Sincerely, &c.

Related posts, for context
January 6 in D.C., with Mary Miller : The objectors included Mary Miller : Mary Miller in The New York Times

Library humor

[Dustin, January 11, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Dustin, the librarian has just told Dustin that she runs a tight ship.

I wonder how many other readers will seek out a list of Dewey Decimal classes to get the joke. (No link: it’s DIY humor.)

The librarian’s bun, pencil, and glasses chain have reminded me to recommend Bill Denton’s coverage of libraries in Archie comics. Thanks, Stephen.

[Did you know that Melvil Dewey was a racist, anti-Semite, and sexual harasser and was known and censured as such in his time? Consider, too, the assumptions that underwrite Dewey’s classifications for religion, homosexuality, and subjects related to women.]

Items in a series

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Mary Miller in the news

Mary Miller (R, Illinois-15), “my” representative in Congress, has made The New York Times, among other prominent sources for news, after telling the audience at a “Moms for America” rally in D.C. that “Hitler was right on one thing.” The Associated Press also has the story. Don Lemon called Miller out last night on CNN. You’ll have to take my word for that: I can’t find the footage online.

Miller is also in the news in another way: Representative Seth Moulton (D, Massachusetts-6) reports that when he took a photograph of Republican members of Congress “proudly refusing to wear masks” while sheltering in place in the Capitol Building,

a freshman Trump acolyte, Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois, ran over and started screaming in my face. Apparently, she didn’t want her hypocrisy on public display, even though earlier today [no, Tuesday] she had no qualms rallying protesters by invoking Hitler: “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.‘”

A petition calling for Miller’s resignation is nearing 15,000 signatures. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D, Illinois) is among the many public figures who have called for Miller to resign. Miller needs to put on a mask, get on a plane, and go home. Or, better, find a new home outside Illinois-15. Miller is a disgrace to her office.

Here’s a brief campaign video in which Miller speaks of her dedication to “the important issues.” First up: “our God-given right to own a gun.”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Because of a dumb mistake not worth explaining, I lost the content of a post about the January 9 Newsday puzzle, the first non-Stumper, by “Andrew Bell Lewis” (Brad Wilber and Matthew Sewell). The post is not available in Google’s cache.

I didn’t realize that I could get the text of this post from my e-mail:

Today’s Newsday  crossword, by “Andrew Bell Lewis” (Matthew Sewell and Brad Wilber), is titled “Themeless Saturday.” In my solving experience, the title for the Newsday Saturday puzzle has always been “Saturday Stumper.” Mother of mercy, as Rico Bandello might have asked, is this the end of the Stumper? For me, this puzzle was surprisingly easy, a Saturday that solves like a Friday, or even a Thursday. I started with a giveaway, 11-A, four letters, “Beatnik’s show of empathy,” and the answers began to fall into place. Crazy, man.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially admire:

9-D, five letters, “Household openers.” I was thinking of prefixes.

17-A, ten letters, “Determined to get it done.” My context for the answer reminds me: “I hate Illinois Nazis.”

22-A, seven letters, “Straw beds.” I had no idea.

25-D, five letters, “Inspirational assistance.” That’s Stumper-y.

28-D, five letters, “Alpine towers on the way out.” An example of how the most mundane answer can be made novel. I first suspected that this strange clue was a cryptic.

40-A, ten letters, “Group game with Yoshi and Luigi.” I’ve never played, but it sounds cute.

43-D, six letters, “Metaphor for fading.” I’ve always like the word that is the answer.

52-A, eight letters, “Existentialist’s void.” Remember existentialism? When I was in college, it was everywhere No void.

56-A, ten letters, “Bug out.” The answer taught me an additional meaning of bug out.

61-A, ten letters, “Mandate for maturity.” No, never.

One bit of murk: 36-A, three letters, “NYY rival.” But for many solvers, the clue and answer will be obvious. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

*

A comment from joecab called attention to the end of the Stumper:

As of tomorrow (1/9). the Saturday Stumper will be renamed THEMELESS SATURDAY. It is now intended to be somewhat less difficult overall than before, though still the most challenging of the week. Your comments are invited; please send them to StanSaturdays@gmail.com.

https://www.facebook.com/stanley.newman.5/posts/3896325300401326

*

January 31: The Stumper will be back, at least occasionally.

Verilux HappyLight Luxe

I’ve long suspected that whenever all the leaves are gone and the sky is grey, I might benefit from what’s called a SAD lamp, a light source to combat seasonal affective disorder. In mid-December I decided to get some light. And now I can recommend the Verilux HappyLight Luxe. It’s a small tablet-like device, 11.7 × 7.5 × 0.5. (And nothing like — ugh — a tanning lamp.) I keep the HappyLight on my desk, angled and off to one side, and let it run for twenty minutes every morning. Getting the right intensity, light shade, and time takes a little experimenting. I think the benefits of this device are real: more energy, better sleep, fewer typos, less despair, even when the sky is really, really grey. Highly recommended.

This device is sold out at Verilux, but the smaller HappyLight Touch Plus is available.

[If I were speaking, I’d have to decide between \ˈlu̇ks\ and \ˈlüks\. I’d go with \ˈlüks\, which seems to me the more downhome pronunciation. Grey, as I think most writers would agree, is greyer than gray. Fewer typos: in other words, better concentration, though my iPhone is still a typo forest.]

Mr. Grip

I speak of household repair, not my hold on sanity. Woodmate’s Mr. Grip is a handy item to have around the house. That screw in the knob that attaches to the rod that holds a roll of paper towels in place in the paper towel holder, the screw that turns and turns but never engages, no matter how many prepositional phrases you add to the sentence? Mr. Grip can solve that problem. Some trial and error might be required. I’ve found that cutting a piece smaller than what I think I need works better. Any empty space can then be filled with prepositional phrases.

Better

Is the United States “better than this”? If it were, it wouldn’t be “this.”

Can the United States be “better than this”? It has to be.

Elizabeth Warren speaks

“A democracy in which the elected leaders do not bend to the will of the voters is no democracy. It is a totalitarian state. And those who pursue this effort are supporting a coup.”

The objectors included Mary Miller

The New York Times this morning lists the members of Congress who objected to certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Only two members of the Illinois House delegation signed on to the effort. “My” representative, Mary Miller (R, Illinois-15) was one of them.

With her objection, Rep. Miller continues to distinguish herself as a new member of the House. Yesterday she made the news for saying, to a pro-Trump* gathering, that “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’”

I hope that Mary Miller’s career in Congress is a short one. There’s already a petition calling for her resignation.

A valediction?

These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2021

Sounds like a valediction from a bunker.

[More: Twitter has required the removal of this Trump* tweet and two others, and has locked Trump*’s account for twelve hours.]

Impeach and remove

Bill Kristol and Ilhan Omar agree: impeach and remove him. Good.

But I haven’t forgotten Kristol’s role in the rise of a Trump* precursor.

January 6 in D.C., with Mary Miller

“This is Trump’s legacy”: Jake Tapper on the madness finding expression in Washington, D.C. today.

“My” new representative in Congress, Mary Miller (R, Illinois-15) pledged in December to object to what she called “tainted election results” and to fight against what she called “the greatest heist of the 21st century.” Like so many older hands, she too is complicit.

Miller made the news for saying yesterday that “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” Here, watch.

Mary Miller, you’re off to a great start.

Lee Breuer (1937–2021)

The theater director Lee Breuer has died at the age of eighty-three. Among his accomplishments: The Gospel at Colonus, an adaptation of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus. The New York Times has an obituary.

“Georgia Blue”

I’ve had this Julius Hemphill composition in mind for some time now.

[“Georgia Blue” (Julius Hemphill). The Julius Hemphill Sextet: Marty Ehrlich, alto solo; Sam Furnace, Andy Laster, alto; Aaron Stewart, Andrew White, tenor; Alex Harding, baritone. From The Hard Blues: Live in Lisbon (Clean Feed, 2004.]

Decluttering, continued

In 2007 I bought a copy of Peter Walsh’s book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. As I wrote in a blog post then, the book had, for me, significant psychotropic power.

But it’s been sitting on a bookshelf ever since. An easy plan for living a richer life with less stuff, or at least the same life with less stuff: put this book in the box for donations.

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Do you recognize him? Leave your answer in the comments. I’ll add a hint if needed.

Here’s a hint: he’s best known as a summer visitor.

One more: he's best known as a summer visitor spending two weeks next door with his aunt.

Oh well. I’ve added the answer in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Trump* tonight

“David Perdue — where’s David?”

Uhh, he’s in quarantine.

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

The Unknown (dir. Tod Browning, 1927). Lon Chaney is an armless knife thrower in a gypsy circus. Joan Crawford is his assistant. Norman Kerry is the circus strongman. Yes, it’s a love triangle, with a startling surprise, a grotesque plot twist, and a suspenseful ending. ★★★★

*

Miss Annie Rooney (dir. Edwin L. Marin, 1942). How sad to be fourteen and making a comeback in the movies. But here’s Shirley Temple as Little Annie Rooney, a teenager in modest circumstances, hep to the jive and up on the latest records, suddenly finding herself in the swank world of wealthy nerdish Marty White (Dickie Moore), his snooty friends, and his family. Will jitterbug lessons and a process to produce artificial rubber triumph over rigid class distinctions? You get just one guess. ★★

*

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (dir. George C. Wolfe, 2020). Though I was put off by the trailer, whose bits of music have little to do with Ma Rainey, I wanted to like this movie, and I really tried. But what I see is an ensemble of fine actors lost to an overwrought stage-bound script, a computer-generated Chicago, and pointless distractions (the mysterious door, sex on an upright piano). Chadwick Boseman gives a powerful performance as a cornetist who speaks of new directions in music and last things; Viola Davis as Rainey is sometimes imposing, sometimes comical, but often absent from the story that takes its title from one of her songs. My favorite scene is a quiet one in which Rainey and trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo) talk about the value of music: “The more music you have in the world, the fuller it is.” ★★★

*

The Old Dark House (dir. James Whale, 1932). Less than a minute in, and it’s clear we’re watching a precursor of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We shift between genuine scares and laughs, as two cars’ worth of sophisticated travelers spend a stormy night with the (ahem) Femm family. Horace F. (Ernest Thesiger), Rebecca F. (Eva Moore), Sir Roderick F. (Elspeth Dudgeon, a female actor), and Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) add an unmistakable queer subtext to the proceedings. Morgan (Boris Karloff) and Saul F. (Brember Wills) made me think of the great documentary Brother’s Keeper (dir. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 1992). ★★★★

*

The Black Cat (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934). Massively bizarre: another stormy night with travelers taking refuge in an isolated house, this one designed and furnished in an ultramodern manner. Boris Karloff, its owner, is an architect and Satanist; Bela Lugosi is a psychiatrist and his antagonist. The bizarreness — a flaying, an attempted human sacrifice, bodies in suspended animation — makes up for the incoherence of the plot. Edgar Allan Poe, whose name appears in the credits (“suggested by”), had nothing to do with this effort. ★★★★

*

Detour (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945). In the trenches of academia, faculty and staff are forever exhorted to do more with less. Few directors did more with less with Edgar G. Ulmer. Dig the silence as Al (Tom Neal) does virtuoso work at the piano; dig the nonexistent cityscape as he walks in the fog; and dig the light on his face in the diner. My favorite creepy image: Vera’s (Ann Savage) frozen profile as she rides with the man whose life she’ll destroy. ★★★★

*

The Apartment (dir. Billy Wilder, 1960). I’m proud of TCM for recognizing that The Apartment is indeed a Christmas movie. Overtones of Huck and Jim: Mr. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is going to save Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), and returning the washroom key is his “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” The raft of the Baxter apartment will be a refuge, at least for a while. Hard to fathom that Fred MacMurray stepped into the dreck of My Three Sons mere months after his great performance here as a glib, heartless fraud. ★★★★

*

The World of Henry Orient (dir. George Roy Hill, 1964). I’ve long thought of this movie in the company of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and A Thousand Clowns: Manhattan as a playground for free spirits, with dark clouds here and there. Peter Sellers stars as Henry Orient, a pianist and ladies’ man whose foreign accent slips again and again back to Brooklyn. But the movie belongs to his young stalkers, Val and Gil (Elizabeth Walker and Merrie Spaeth), whose imaginative flights turn Orient into a figure of innocent, comically cult-like devotion — until innocence gives way to painful realizations. With Tom Bosley, Angela Lansbury, Bibi Osterwald, Paula Prentiss, Phyllis Thaxter, and Central Park in winter. ★★★★

*

The Shop at Sly Corner (dir. George King, 1947). Oskar Homolka stars as an antiques dealer, doing business on a sinisterly dark and narrow London street. He appears at first to be an old-world widower, all cigars and pince-nez, doting on his daughter (Muriel Pavlow), a rising violinist. But there’s more to his shop than we might at first suspect — if that sinister darkness didn’t tip us off. Understated but gripping suspense. ★★★★

*

Three by Robert Siodmak

Christmas Holiday (1944). The title points in one direction, but the director’s name points in another. A noirish story of lost souls in New Orleans, as a singer (Deanna Durbin) tells her life story to a serviceman (Dean Harens) stuck in town because of bad weather. The villain of the piece: Gene Kelly (really). The most remarkable scenes: the concert hall, the church on Christmas Eve. ★★★★

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945). At the center of the film: the remnants of an old New Hampshire textile family, unassuming brother Harry (George Sanders) and his sisters Lettie and Hester (Geraldine Fitzgerald, Moyna MacGill). Into this celibate world steps a glamorous visitor from the New York office (Ella Raines), and her relationship with Harry threatens to upend the siblings’ house. Suggestions of incestuous desire are unmistakable here. The conclusion, even if dictated by a censor, is still compelling in its suggestion of what could — and why not? — have happened. ★★★★

The Dark Mirror (1946). A tour de force for Olivia de Havilland. Did she or didn’t she kill a doctor found dead in his apartment? It’s complicated. With Lew Ayres as a dapper psychiatrist and James Mitchell as a rumbled police lieutenant. ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

A pocket notebook sighting (with EXchange names)

[William Woodson as “Dave.” From Vice Squad (dir. Arnold Laven, 1953). Click either image for a larger view.]

Here a police officer poses as a telephone repairman so as to snoop. And he finds a six-ring pocket notebook with a whole bunch of “clients.” And their telephone numbers. And a misspelled state name: Arizonia.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Fallen Angel : Framed : The Little Giant : Loophole : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once