Twelve movies

Three Strangers (dir. Jean Negulesco, 1946). London, 1938: a woman (Geraldine Fitzgerald) in possession of a statue of the goddess Kwan Yin, enlists two strangers (Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre) to join her in making a wish to the goddess at midnight of the Chinese New Year (midnight: in what time zone?). Many complications follow, none of which I’m willing to rehearse here. Suffice it to say that this is a movie best watched for atmosphere (and even the title sequence is a nod to The Maltese Falcon). The best line is Lorre’s: “Never get mixed up with a Chinese goddess.” ★★★ (TCM)

*

The True Story of Lynn Stuart (dir. Lewis Seiler, 1958). A superior B movie, based, yes, on a true story that’s even more extraordinary than the one told her. Grieved by the loss of her sister’s son to an overdose, Phyllis Carter (Betsy Palmer), a Los Angeles “housewife” with no police training, insists that the cops and her husband permit her to go undercover to help catch narcotics traffickers. Phyllis becomes “Lynn Stuart,” out on parole after helping in a bank heist, now working as a carhop at a drive-in restaurant where she meets trafficker Willie Down (Jack Lord) and strikes up a relationship with him. The danger grows and grows, and Phyllis soon finds that she’s in deeper than she had expected (and imagine: in real life, she did this work for six years). ★★★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature Love in Disguise

This Is the Night (dir. Frank Tuttle, 1932). When javelin-thrower Stephen (Cary Grant, in his screen debut) gets back home from the Olympics ahead of schedule, he finds that his wife Claire (the ill-fated Thelma Todd) has been planning to travel to Venice with her lover Gerald (Roland Young) — uh-oh. But Gerald’s friend Bunny (Charles Ruggles) saves the day by saying that, no, the tickets are for Gerald and his wife. The one snag: Gerald isn’t married, so the charming Germaine (Lili Damita) is hired to take on the role, and all five are off to Venice, with amusing complications to follow. “Another javelin lesson, I suppose”: that’s pre-Code! ★★★★

Thirty Day Princess (dir. Marion Gering, 1934). The kingdom of Taronia is in financial trouble, and banker Richard Gresham (Edward Arnold) has a plan: a goodwill tour of the United States with Princess Catterina, aka Zizzi (Sylvia Sidney), to get backing for millions in bonds. The plan’s opponent: newspaper publisher Porter Madison III (Cary Grant). The princess is supposed to win him over, but when she comes down with the mumps, Gresham finds a lookalike to play her part: bit actress Nancy Lane (also Sidney). A sweet, witty farce ensues. ★★★★

The Princess Comes Across (dir. William K. Howard, 1936). Carole Lombard is down-on-her-luck Brooklyn-born Wanda Nash, an actress who poses as the Garbo-like Princess Olga to sail across the Atlantic back to the States. Fred MacMurray is King (heh) Mantell, concertina player extraordinaire and ship’s entertainer. Also onboard: a killer, a blackmailer, and five international detectives. Not especially funny, not especially saucy. ★★

The Major and the Minor (dir. Billy Wilder, 1942). Ginger Rogers is Susan Applegate, who poses as an eleven-year-old (“Su-Su”) to get a cheaper ticket back to Iowa from New York, and on the train she meets up with Major Philip Kirby (Ray Milland), who’s headed back to the Indiana military school where he teaches, and to his fiancée (Rita Johnson). We can see “Uncle Philip,” as Su-Su calls him, fight back his feelings for the pseudo-child again and again: he lights up and then appears to remind himself, “Yeah, but she’s eleven.” A weirdly sentimental touch: Ginger Rogers pretended to be younger to get a cheaper fare when traveling the vaudeville circuit by train with her mother, and here, in her one screen role, Lela Rogers, Ginger’s mother, plays Susan’s mother. The Major and the Minor, Wilder’s first American movie, is exceedingly strange. ★★

*

Nocturne (dir. Edward L. Marin, 1946). Had we seen it? Oh, right, we’d seen it. George Raft is Joe Warne, an LAPD detective doggedly investigating what everyone thinks was a songwriter’s suicide. This time around the movie reminded me of The Big Sleep: the leaps of logic with which Joe solves the case defy logic. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Threat (dir. Felix E. Feist, 1949). “Red” Kluger (Charles McGraw) escapes from Folsom hellbent on killing the detective (Michael O’Shea) and district attorney who put him away. Kluger, his goons, his victims-to-be, and a former flame (Virginia Grey), held against her will, hole up a shack in the desert, waiting for the plane that will take Kluger and his comrades to safety. The obvious flaw in this story: any right-thinking feral convict would kill his victims right away. But, of course, it’s a movie, and it offers grisly violence, genuine suspense, and a clever bit of conversation that saves the day. ★★★ (M)

*

Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001). “It’s been a very strange day,” says one character. “And getting stranger,” says another. Los Angeles as a city of dreams, Los Angeles as a city of nightmares and self-destruction, with trope after trope after trope marching across the screen. I have to admit — rightly or wrongly — that I lack the patience to try to work out “the meaning” when I suspect that I’m watching a story whose meaning is ultimately unknowable. ★★★ (CC)

*

None Shall Escape (dir. André de Toth, 1944). A movie of the future: made while the war was still going, it depicts a trial in which a Nazi officer, Wilhelm Grimm (Alexander Knox), must answer for his crimes against humanity, as recounted by a trio of witnesses: his brother (Erik Rolf), a Catholic priest (Henry Travers), and a Polish woman to whom Grimm was once engaged (Marsha Hunt). The movie is unflinching in its depiction of atrocity and casual cruelty. It’s also Marsha Hunt’s finest hour, in a role that calls for great emotional range. The most moving scene: the train platform and Kaddish. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Hangman Waits (dir. A. Barr-Smith, 1947). Short and strange, a story of Scotland Yard and the press working to track down a murderer. Hitchcock-like at times in its quick pace and reliance on implication; Lynch-like, really, in its gruesome weirdness. Many telephones, typewriters, and Linotype machines in use — a church organ too. So poverty-stricken that it makes Detour look like a Hollywood extravaganza. ★★★ (YT)

*

Emilia Pérez (dir. Jacques Audiard, 2024). A Mexican drug lord, Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), hires a lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) to arrange for gender-affirming surgery. Leaving a wife (Selena Gomez) and two young sons behind, Manitas is reborn as Emilia Pérez, and finds a new role in life as the leader of a movement to recover Mexico’s disappeared. A curious question as Emilia’s new life develops: is she still really Manitas after all? An extraordinarily inventive movie, a mix of musical and thriller, with overtones of Hamilton, Vertigo, Jacques Demy’s musicals, and “the woman’s picture.” ★★★★ (N)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

HCR on bombshells

Heather Cox Richardson writes today about several bombshells. [HCR is a reliable source for facts with context.]

Pause, a Mac app

“Periodically reminds you to take a break, and step away from the computer”: Pause is a free app for macOS, by Harshil Shah, available from the App Store.

I tried four or five such apps this weekend. To my mind (or eyes), Pause is simplest and best. Thank you, Harshil, for sharing your work.

[For twenty minutes of screen time, twenty seconds of looking at something twenty feet away — that’s one way to manage your vision.]

Ben Webster, “Come Sunday”

Add some music to the day: “Come Sunday,” from Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige (1943). Ben Webster, tenor saxophone; Oscar Peterson, piano; Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, bass; Tony Inzalaco, drums. December 14, 1972, Hanover, Germany.

Staten Island north

[9 Carroll Place, Staten Island, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

One more Staten Island tax photograph, from the northern tip of Forgotten Borough, looking a bit scary. Today it’s a million-dollar house. Here’s a page with a few more photographs.

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, constructing as “Anna Stiga” (Stan Again). The pseudonym is supposed to be the sign of an easier puzzle, but I found this one quite challenging. (Forty-one minutes.) One difficulty: the puzzle’s northwest and southeast sections each have just one point of exit or entry. No other cross streets, so to speak.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, nine letters, “‘Jezebel of Jazz’ who sang with Satchmo and Shearing.” Yes! But how she must have hated that name. She sang with Louis Armstrong at least once, sort of. With George Shearing, I just don’t know. But Stan must be a fan.

4-D, seven letters, “Mused till morning.” Kinda misleading.

5-D, six letters, “Billy Bob or Angelina, in 2000.” If you say so. I don’t have much patience for this sort of factoid.

10-D, eight letters, “Household wedge.” Neat. My first thought was HANDIRON.

17-A, eight letters, “Suckers ready to scam.” A nicely colloquial answer, but I think “to be scammed” would be clearer.

18-A, five letters, “Sucker with sensors.” Ha.

23-D, seven letters, “Word from Malay ‘fish sauce.’” Huh.

29-D, nine letters, “Muppet collectibles, e.g.” I’d want something less blatantly commercial as an example.

30-D, nine letters, “‘Best musical satirist of the 20th century,’ per Dr. Demento.” The doctor is right.

33-A, seven letters, “What to do at a reunion.” Crossing with 23-D, this answer is a bit of extra fun.

39-D, six letters, “Hail-fellow well met.” Well, I’ll be: that’s an adjective.

40-A, eight letters, “Advocate hyperactively.” I imagine people might still be said to do it.

42-D, five letters, “The loudest of them was 112 decibels, per Guinness (2021).” Ick.

My favorite in this puzzle:49-A, eight letters, “What might cover your elbows.” Academic that I am, or was, I thought of suede patches. But I like this answer better.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A store-brand crossword

On the back of a box of Great Value cereal (Brown Flakes), a strange crossword. The 15 × 15 grid includes eight two-letter answers and six squares that don’t cross other squares, giving the puzzle something of the look of the simple crosswords that might appear in the back pages of a tabloid. And yet the puzzle includes some wildly out-of-the-way clues and answers:

1-A, five letters, “Egg white.”

1-A, four letters, “Growl.”

13-A, seven letters, “Not freely moving.”

35-A, four letters, “Fetid.”

54-D, four letters, “Portable ice-box.” The Internets tell me that this answer is Australian slang.

I don’t think AI created this puzzle — unless someone forgot to tell it to make every letter cross. The answers, if you want them, are in the cereal aisle, on the side of the box. Also in the comments.

[Brown Flakes: à la Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.]

Down to the Gulf of Mexico

The Associated Press is down with the Gulf of America:

The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name.... As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.

Yeah, but “Gulf of Mexico” is already easily recognizable to all audiences. Particularly to blues audiences. As Mississippi Fred McDowell sang:

The 61 highway, longest road I know
You know it reach from Atlanta, Georgia,
    down to the Gulf of Mexico

[“As the major route northward out of Mississippi, U. S. Highway 61 has been of particular inspiration to blues artists. The original road began in downtown New Orleans, traveled through Baton Rouge, and ran through Natchez, Vicksburg, Leland, Cleveland, Clarksdale, and Tunica in Mississippi, to Memphis and north to the Canadian border.... Although many bluesmen used the lyrics ‘Highway 61, longest road that I know,’ their descriptions of the highway’s route were often misleading”: Highway 61 Blues (Mississippi Blues Trail).]

He’s going there

The FFOTUS is speaking and blaming last night’s horrific helicopter-plane collision on the Biden administration and DEI. He adds that Pete Buttigieg has “a good line of bullshit.”

[FF: First Felon.]

“A fragrance of stunning richness and complexity”

I’ve always thought of the smell of New York City as a blend of urine, exhaust, garbage, and cigarette smoke — plus the hot mechanical smell wafting up through subway grates. I think Alison Bechdel and I are sharing some bandwith here. From Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006):

[Click for a larger view.]

Bechdel’s Fun Home and (the more difficult) Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012) are profound graphic memoirs. I recommend them both.

The background for this panel: Village Cigars, at 110 Seventh Avenue South. The landmark store closed in 2024 after a hundred or more (?) years as a tobacco shop. In its WPA tax photograph, it was known as United Cigars.

Reading scores in decline

The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows reading scores for fourth- and eighth-graders in decline. On the NBC Nightly News last night, the conclusion was that “no one is quite sure why.” An educational researcher suggested a number of reasons: “could be screens, could be hangover from the Great Recession, could be relaxation of accountability, could be grade inflation.” No consideration of how reading instruction might play a part.

Related reading
All OCA reading posts (Pinboard)

Knees

Mark Zuckerberg is running out of knees.

Car(a)mel

It came up in conversation. Two syllables, or three? Edwin L. Battistella considers the difference.

I say the word with three syllables, using Merriam-Webster’s sad leftover pronunciation bits: /ˈka-rə-mel/. Those bits don’t even get an audio recording of their own at M-W. But if I were speaking of caramel-coated popcorn, something I never get to speak of these days, I’d say /ˈkär-məl/.

[Yes, there are plenty of more important things to talk about right now. And I do. But I’m wanting to post other things these days.]

Housman, misquoted

The television was on for “warmth.” Dr. Arnold Vincent (Jeffrey Lynn) was pouring himself a drink. From Whiplash (dir. Lewis Seiler, 1948):

“‘This does more than mortals can, to justify God’s ways to man.’ I think that’s misquoted, but it’s a rousing sentiment.”

The source, of course, is A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, LXII (1896):

Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.

I wonder whether the misquotation, announced as such, is a way to avoid complications with copyright. Or maybe it’s a way to signal that the doctor is sloppy in all things.

"We"

[Click for a larger, perhaps more exasperating view.]

Gosh, how I dislike this use of “we.” Speak for yourself, Arts & Letters Daily. And if you really mean what you say, stop linking to items about Joyce, Knausgaard, Proust, &c.

Weatherspeak

Heard last night, as the meteorologist spoke of Friday’s weather: “This is primarily a rain event.”

Or as they say in The Fantasticks, “Soon It’s Gonna Rain.”

One more “Orange Crate Art”

Van Dyke Parks and company performing “Orange Crate Art,” at Van Dyke’s Final Farewell Concert (January 18) or Final Farewell Parte Deux (January 19), at The Write-Off Room, Studio City, Los Angeles.

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From an autobiography

It begins:

I am a lawyer and real estate agent.  I am in the third grade.

[Used with permission.]

Pinboard tags again

Tags for Pinboard, the social bookmarking site, can once again be viewed by readers without a Pinboard account. Maciej Cegłowski has added a CAPTCHA to allow access to tags for real readers and cut traffic from the AI bots harvesting the Internets.

Wanna see, say, every OCA “How to improve writing” post? Have at it. Just click in the middle of the blue box and you’ll see links to posts.

I’ve been using Pinboard since 2010 to make an index of blog posts, and I’m happy to see it working for all readers again. Raindrop.io, for me, is just too cumbersome.

[And yes, people come to these pages via Pinboard, and head off to Pinboard via links here.]

Recently updated

Out on State Island Contra Google Maps, that house, built in the 1840s, still stands.

Out on Staten Island

[70 Satterlee Street, Staten Island, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Just an old house from the far end of the Forgotten Borough. Save perhaps for the lookout (we’re not far from the Arthur Kill and Raritan Bay), it looks to me more like something from the dilapidated world of The Sound and the Fury. This house made it into the 1980s but is no longer standing.

Notice the car and workmen (?) to the left.

*

Later that same day: There’s no trusting Google Maps, which shows nothing but an empty lot for 70 Satterlee Street. But this house still stands. And it’s a house with history: the Henry Hogg Biddle House, built in the 1840s. Here are two more views.

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Kate Chin Park, each of whose previous Stumpers has prompted me to write, “Please, more KCP Stumpers.” Today’s puzzle is a doozy, a lulu, a sockdolager if you will, full of variety and challenges. Please, more KCP Stumpers.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

6-D, seven letters, “Rampart part.” Nicely phrased. I think I have the answer in my head from reading Steven Millhauser.

8-D, three letters, “Literature scholars’ org.” In what feels like a previous lifetime, I belonged.

9-D, four letters, “Stepmom to Mary, Elizabeth and Edward.” You’d expect a first name, wouldn’t you?

14-A, five letters, “Surname meaning ‘priest.’” This answer broke the puzzle open for me.

20-D, seven letters, “Freshen, as one’s study.” Pretty ambitious. I’d think that clearing some papers from the floor might be enough.

21-A, six letters, “How to respond to ‘I didn’t get it.’” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

31-A, fifteen letters, “Communication challenge.” Funny how the clue immediately suggests, at least to me, a technology glitch.

33-D, nine letters, “It pairs well with patés.” Who needs paté?

38-A, thirteen letters, “Uninvolved associate.” I wondered whether this clue is accurate. It is.

48-A, three letters, “Zuo Zongtang’s much-seen alias.” Funny.

50-D, four letters, “London lip-lock.” A word that has always sounded filthy to my ears.

58-A, nine letters, “Yup.” I don’t know anyone who says “Yup,” but the answer has some currency in my world.

My favorite in this puzzle: 10-D, ten letters, “The majority of corkscrews and chopsticks.” RSTRNTWARE?!

Please, more KCP Stumpers.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Repurposed sardine tin

[From Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (dir. Merlin Crossingham and Nick Park, 2024). Click any image for a larger view.]

There’s the old movie trope of prison inmates using hand mirrors so that they can see one another from cell to cell as they talk. Here, Feathers McGraw has repurposed a sardine tin as a mirror. From his quarters, he sees the screen of the computer he’s hacked into. It’s Wallace’s computer, and there’s Wallace, welcoming the user to his secret files. And then we see Feathers.

Are prison inmates permitted to have mirrors? Do they use them to communicate? It seems so, though the mirrors are not likely to be glass, and the inmates are not likely to be penguins.

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Toast

If you watch enough older movies, you will notice that the breakfast table often holds a toast rack, filled with slices of dry toast. No one ever eats the toast. It just waits.

They must have been making a lot of breadcrumbs back in the day.

Recently updated

Downtown Dingburg Now with new light on the Leona Helmsley Club.

Gary Snyder’s notebooks and journals

From a short film by Colin Still: the poet Gary Snyder, somewhere in the 1990s, talks about his notebooks and journals. All the sections of the film may be found on this page. There’s much more to see at Still’s website Optic Nerve, including short films about nine more American poets.

As Snyder says, what counts is writing, not being organized. But damn if he isn’t really organized too. He mentions that the first notebook in his hand is a calendar. That pale green and white paper, the cover, the pen in its loop: I would swear that he’s holding a Day-Timer.

[Click for a larger possible Day-Timer.]

Thanks to Kevin at harvest.ink

Related reading
All OCA notebook posts (Pinboard)

[I used Day-Timers a million years ago. Looking at the company’s website, I’m not surprised to see that the page design — at least the pocket page-a-day design — hasn’t changed a bit. As dowdy as they wanna be!]

Robert Caro’s home library

From The Washington Post, “A peek inside Robert Caro’s home library, hidden shelves and all.” Bring your magnifying glass, or at least take screenshots for embiggening.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)

[Sharing a gift link before my cancelled subscription runs out.]

2024 — no, 2025

A quick trick if you’re again and again typing last year’s year in the early days of this year: use a text replacement app to change 2024 to 2025. If you’re writing about last year’s realities, though, you better be careful. No one wants to read about your 2025 Christmas — yet.

Downtown Dingburg

[“The Tragic Kingdom.” Zippy, January 23, 2025. Click for a larger view.]

There are many more details to enjoy in today’s Zippy : a Leona Helmsley Club, for instance. I think that means a fan club, not a high-end bar bat with which to beat hotel employees.

[Just for fun, I asked Bill Griffith about the club: it’s for beatings.]

The Poindexter bar bat, by the way, is a Zippy thing.

Two more Zippy downtowns: one from 2018, one more from 2018.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

“Oh ho ho ho”

Robert Moses on the wane, his power gone. From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

And as they walked down the steps of the cottage to the author’s car, Moses did something that made him feel for an instant that the man walking behind him was not Robert Moses but Paul. The author had, unknown to Robert Moses, spent time with his dead brother. Paul Moses had managed to keep his chin up even in discussing the misfortunes of his life, but sometimes, drifting into reveries during lulls in the conversation, he had — unconsciously, it seemed — uttered a phrase, a sigh, almost a moan, that hinted at the depths of the melancholy within him: a painful, reflective sighing: “Oh ho ho ho. Oh ho ho ho.” The author had speculated that so unusual an expression might be inherited from their father. But in all the times he had previously talked with Robert Moses, the author had never heard him make that sound of discouragement and something close to despair.

But he made it now.

This post is my last from The Power Broker.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)

Garth Hudson (1937–2025)

He was the last original member of The Band. Here’s an obituary from The Guardian.

And here, from 2017, is some extraordinary pianism, a lengthy solo lead-in to “The Weight.” I hear the hymn “Jerusalem” (Sir Hubert Parry’s setting of a William Blake poem), “Old Folks” (Willard Robison–Dedette Lee Hill), “Dardanella” (Felix Bernard–Johnny S. Black), a bit of Brahms (thanks, Elaine), and “The Last Rose of Summer” (a traditional melody joined to a Thomas Moore poem). I suspect there’s still more to hear.

I don’t know what the screams from the audience are about — trying to get the pianist to wrap it up? At any rate, they’re to be ignored, just as Garth Hudson ignored them.

Jules Feiffer (1929–2025)

The cartoonist and writer was ninety-five. Here’s an NPR obituary, with links to more NPR features about his work.

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: AMC, Criterion Channel, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

The Sleeping Tiger (dir. Joseph Losey, 1954). “We’ve never had a criminal for a houseguest — at least one we knew about.” A daft premise: prison psychiatrist Clive Edmonds (Alexander Knox) takes in the man who tried to mug him, Frank Clemmons (Dirk Bogarde), for a six-month effort at rehabilitation. Clive’s wife, Glenda (Alexis Smith), left to her own devices as her schlubby husband is off to give one lecture after another, is increasingly drawn to this young, pompadoured, rather brutal stranger, one already possessed of a rich criminal record. A sudden, unconvincing plot turn keeps me from giving the movie four stars, but Smith gives a great performance as a self-abasing, emotionally starved mess. ★★★ (YT)

*

Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants (dir. David Mamet, 1996). A filmed version of Ricky Jay’s Broadway show. An amazing performance of card tricks, card throwing, and sleight of hand, enhanced with learned patter. To watch Ricky Jay in action is to be transported to a Steven Millhauser-like world in which things happen that are beyond explanation. When someone like Ricky Jay leaves us, I think about all the knowledge that goes with that person. ★★★★ (YT)

[Watch it while it’s there.]

*

Maestra (dir. Maggie Contreras, 1023). A documentary about La Maestra, an international competition, held in Paris, for female orchestral conductors. From 250 entrants, fourteen are chosen; then five; and finally one. The most interesting story, to my mind: that of a French émigré, now teaching in Iowa, who finds herself confronting the painful family life she left behind. What would help to offset the unvarying narrative movement (conducting followed by eliminations): greater exploration of the sexism that the competitors themselves talk about — for instance, the suggestion, even at La Maestra, that one competitor should smile more. ★★★ (N)

*

Shadow in the Sky (dir. Fred M. Wilcox, 1952). An oddly low-key treatment of combat-induced PTSD. Ralph Meeker plays Burt, a veteran receiving long-term care in a VA hospital. Nancy Davis is his sister; James Whitmore, his brother-in-law; Jean Hagen, a sympathetic nurse. Burt is tormented by rain, and a moment of crisis forces him to overcome his fear. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Love Actually (dir. Richard Curtis, 2003). It’s a Christmas movie and feel-good movie, with a huge cast and slightly bewildering network of relationships, familial, romantic, friendly, work-related. The comic bits are genuinely funny; the moving moments are genuinely moving; the corny moments are painfully corny. And the plotting is delightfully intricately, with everything coming together in an airport. Stealing the movie: Billy Nighy as a dissolute rocker looking for a comeback with a Christmas refashioning of the Troggs’ “Love Is All Around.” ★★★ (AMC)

*

Footsteps in the Dark (dir. Lloyd Bacon, 1941). A harmless murder-mystery comedy, with Errol Flynn as Francis Warren, an investment counselor who secretly writes mystery novels as F.X. Pettijohn. When a prospective (and sketchy) client is murdered, Warren turns amateur detective to find the killer, consorting with burlesque dancer Blondie White (Lee Patrick), staying out all night (“board meeting”), and arousing his wife’s (Brenda Marshall) and mother-in-law’s (Lucile Watson) suspicions. I have no interest in swashbucklers, but I like Flynn in this comic role, lobbing stock compliments to his tart-tongued mother-in-law and impersonating a Texas oilman to impress Blondie. With Ralph Bellamy, William Frawley, Alan Hale, Allen Jenkins, Roscoe Karns, and several actors from the second half of the alphabet. ★★★ (TCM)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature Cast Aginst Type: Heroes as Villains

The Velvet Touch (dir. Jack Gage, 1948). Valerie Stanton (Rosalind Russell) is a Broadway star famed for performances in light comedies — five smash hits in a row — but she wants to branch out and play Hedda Gabler (and think of it: here’s a Hollywood picture that assumes an audience’s at least glancing familiarity with Ibsen). Miss Stanton’s producer and one-time lover Gordon Dunning (Leon Ames) wants to keep his star in comedy, and threatens to reveal an ugly history to her new lover if she doesn’t comply — and within the first few minutes of the story, he’s dead, and the movie turns to flashbacks. A brilliantly filmed ultra-opulent noir, with great sets (that library!) and great music (by Leigh Harline), and sharp All About Eve-like dialogue (by Leo Rosten). With Leo Genn, Claire Trevor, and Sydney Greenstreet as Captain Danbury, looking backward to Inspector Bucket and forward to Lieutenant Columbo. ★★★★

*

Immediate Family (dir. Denny Tedesco, 2022). From the director of The Wrecking Crew, a warmhearted documentary about four session musicians whose names you’ve likely seen on some album’s back cover: guitarists Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar and Waddy Wachtel, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkel. Many great stories of dumb luck (right place, right time) and life on the road, though there’s almost no discussion of how a life in music impacts one’s obligations to one’s own immediate family. The greater reason I’d fault this documentary: coming in at 1:42, it’s too long, with too many professions of mutual admiration and too many details better left to Wikipedia articles or a website for the movie. I don’t need to know, for instance, that one of these guys produced six albums — one, two, three, four, five, six — for Jimmy Buffett. ★★★ (N)

*

Stakeout on Dope Street (dir. Irvin Kershner, 1958). A trio of teenaged boys find a briefcase holding a two-pound can of white powder, and when they figure out what they’ve found, they’re determined to cash in — and so are criminals whose briefcase is missing. I thought I was going to see a piece of lurid dreck, but I found instead a well-made Dragnet-style B movie, with a strong script, capable unknown actors, and surprising camerawork (that bowling ball). Best scene: a long flashback in which heroin addict Danny (Allen Kramer) recounts an episode of withdrawal. A bonus: music by Richard Markowitz, performed by the Hollywood Chamber Jazz Group. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Walls of Jericho (dir. John M. Stahl, 1948). So many older melodramas now look like case studies of the dark triad — Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy — which might have been found even in the early 1900s in the county seat of Jericho, Kansas. Here we meet (among others) county attorney Dave Connors (Cornel Wilde) and his alcoholic wife Belle (Ann Dvorak), Dave’s old friend and newspaper publisher Tucker Wedge (Kirk Douglas) and his wife Algeria (Linda Darnell), “she-lawyer” Julia Norman (Anne Baxter), and young Marjorie Ransome (Colleen Townsend). One of these characters will seek to poison relationships between others, whatever the cost. Political rivalries, ugly gossip, the small-mindedness of life in a provincial place, and, yes, the dark triad. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Proud and Profane (dir. George Seaton, 1956). And the dark triad can also be found in 1943, at an Allied military base in New Caledonia. William Holden is Colonel Black (his first name, Colin, surfaces very late in the story), a rigid, domineering Marine, a wildly dishonest commander of men and women. Deborah Kerr is Lee Ashley, widow of a Marine killed at Guadalcanal, here as a Red Cross volunteer. Their relationship swerves into a mightmare of toxic behavior, and the story jumps several sharks before losing its balance, falling into the ocean, and being eaten by one last shark — that is, plot twist. ★★ (YT)

*

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (dir. Merlin Crossingham and Nick Park, 2024). Wallace invents a smart gnome to do gardening (and bring in ££); the evil penguin Feathers McGraw (from The Wrong Trousers) reprograms the gnome from the zoo where he’s locked up; an army of evil gnomes takes shape; and chaos ensues. There are many wonderful small touches: a Brown Betty teapot, a Penguin paperback, a box of “Brown Flakes” (cereal), Feathers’s sardine can, and, again and again, the meanings communicated by the facial expressions of silent characters. But the story gets bogged down in a subplot about Inspector Mackintosh and Police Constable Mukherjee (reminiscent of Wicked Little Letters), and Wallace’s cheerful conclusion about automation and artificial intelligence — “I knew you would embrace technology in the end, lad” — seems weak tea in light of the havoc the gnomes have wrought. And speaking of gnomes: they’re kinda terrifying, and I’m not sure any child younger than maybe eight would feel at ease watching them as they march toward the audience. ★★★ (N)

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HCR on 1/20/25

Heather Cox Richardson writes about the day.

[Post republished with this year’s 1/20. We’re not in 2024 anymore.]

Message received, maybe

“Mom, we’ll just visit here in your room today. Donald Trump was elected president, and the giant television in the dining room has his inauguration on. So we’ll just stay here.”

And it seemed (emphasis seemed ) that my mom — almost ninety-three, with profound dementia — understood what I was saying.

MLK

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929. I’ll repost (for obvious reasons) a sentence that I posted in 2020. From Why We Can’t Wait (1964):

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.

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Half-staff

[Image found here.]

Lillian Edelstein, 2F

[867 East 176th Street, East Tremont, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Lillian Edelstein and her husband Sam lived in this building in apartment 2F. Lillian’s sister lived in 3F. The sisters’ mother lived in 3G. This building is one of the 159 buildings, housing 1,530 families, that Robert Moses tore down in 1953 and 1954 for the Cross Bronx Expressway. Moses said that the buildings were “slums,” “walkups,” “tenements.” “Tenements? ” a former resident of the neighborhood said to Robert Caro. “Listen, I lived in tenements. These were not tenements at all.”

Lillian Edelstein, a self-described “housewife,” became the leader of the East Tremont Neighborhood Association and kept up a valiant fight against the destruction of her neighborhood. But the fix was in. Here is an affidavit in which she told her story. Here is a 2015 obituary. And here is a 1989 episode of The American Experience, “The World That Moses Built” (aired January 10, 1989), in which you can see and hear Lillian Edelstein talk about Robert Moses and her fight, briefly at 6:13 and at greater length in a segment about the Cross Bronx that begins at 41:47.

What does Robert Moses think about the constuction of the Cross Bronx Expressway and the destruction of East Tremont? From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Asked if he had not felt a sense of awe — of difficulties of a new immensity — when, beginning active planning of the great road during the war, he had first seen the miles of apartment houses in his way, he said he had not. “There are more houses in the way [than on Long Island],” he said, “there are more people in the way — that’s all. There’s very little real hardship in the thing. There’s a little discomfort and even that is greatly exaggerated. The scale was new, that was all that was new about it. And by this time there was the prospect of enough money to do things on this scale.” Asked if he had ever feared that the tenants might defeat him, he said, “Nah, nobody could have stopped it.” As a matter of fact, the East Tremont opposition hadn’t really been much trouble at all.

“I don’t think they were too bad,” Robert Moses said. “It was a political thing that stirred up the animals there.”

As you can see in Google Maps, there is now no there there, only the polluted air above the Cross Bronx Expressway. (You′ll have to turn the image around to see the missing side of the street.)

Related reading
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A Family Circus double-talker

“Wow! Look at that franistan frelm!” There’s more to Bill of The Family Circus than has met the eye.

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Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper: another puzzle by “Lester Ruff” (Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor) that for me was really ruff. I had to look up two answers to finish. One, 3-D, six letters, “Bowling pins, informally,” calls for what feels like an antique bit of slang. The other, 30-A, nine letters, “Certain Miniature/Miniature mix,” had me stumped about the first three letters. ARF.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, four letters, “Obligation evidence.” Just an odd little word.

6-D, five letters, “Women’s group.” A strange way to clue this answer.

8-D, fifteen letters, “Blow things up.” Pretty tricky.

11-D, six letters, “Subject-changing intro.” I hear it often.

13-D, eight letters, “Literally, ‘little cake.’” And now it seems obvious.

14-A, eight letters, “Pinterest recycling suggestions.” If you say so.

34-A, four letters, “What some fight like.” Somehow I could see it.

35-A, three letters, “Himalayan center.” I could see this one too.

36-D, seven letters, “Entertainment since radio days.” Yeah, but they weren’t called that then.

44-A, letters, nine letters, “First musical act with a permanent retail store (Carnaby Street, since 2020).” My first thought was ELTONJOHN. Or, rather, ELTONJOHN? A slightly underhanded way to clue the real answer.

45-D, six letters, “Unload on.” Sneaky.

62-A, eight letters, “Tony winner (1951) for Grace Kelly’s Oscar role (1954).” All I read while solving was “Tony winner (1951).” The rest of the clue was at the top of the next column of print. But I’m not sure the additional info helps: it all feels mighty out of the way. And the phrasing is odd: you don’t win an award for someone else’s role. Better: “Tony winner (1951) for role for which Grace Kelly later won an Oscar.”

My favorite in this puzzle: 36-A, fifteen letters, “Live wire?” Yes, still a thing in 2025.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Awesome

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974), a summary of roads and bridges. Wait for the last sentence:

Those highways and bridges were awesome. The transportation network built by Robert Moses after World War II ranks with the greatest feats of urban construction in recorded history. Possibly it outranks them all. Possibly it is history’s greatest feat of urban construction. The longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere, the longest suspension bridge in the world, the largest and most complex traffic interchanges ever built — these were all merely segments of that achievement. Its over-all scale can perhaps best be grasped by a single statistic: mileage. The “urban” highways — controlled-access through roads within cities and the heavily populated surrounding suburbs — built in America during the quarter century following the Second World War dwarfed any urban highway or system of highways built in any country in the world any time in recorded history. In 1964, when Robert Moses completed his major highway building, there were completed or well under way in the New York metropolitan region 899 miles of such highways — 627 built by him, many of the rest, most of which were in New Jersey, built as a result of the Joint Program he worked out with the Port Authority. No other metropolitan region in America possessed 700 miles of such highways. No other metropolitan region possessed 600 miles — or 500. Even Los Angeles, which presented itself to history as the most highway-oriented of cities — which was, in fact, not a city in the older sense in which New York was a city but a collection of suburbs whose very existence was due to highways — possessed in 1964 only 459 miles of such highways. No city in America had more than half as many miles of such highways as New York. But nothing about his roads was as awesome as the congestion on them.

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David Lynch (1946–2024)

The filmmaker has died at the age of seventy-eight. The Guardian has an obituary. The Criterion Channel has a large selection of movies and extras. (But no Blue Velvet.)

From a statement by Lynch’s family: “There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.‘”

I’ll footnote that for anyone who might wonder: “Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole” is from an old bit of folk poetry known as “The Optimist’s Creed.” It’s perhaps best known as the motto of the Mayflower Shops, a New York chain that served coffee and doughnuts. The Mayflower version reads like so:

As you ramble on thru Life, Brother,
Whatever be your Goal,
Keep your eye upon the Doughnut,
And not upon the Hole.

From a 2024 interview, some sobering words from David Lynch himself, who suffered from emphysema:

“Smoking was something that I absolutely loved, but in the end, it bit me. It was part of the art life for me: the tobacco and the smell of it, and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work, or thinking about things; nothing like it in this world is so beautiful. Meanwhile, it’s killing me. So I had to quit.”

Swinging the meat ax

Robert Moses, hacking his way through neighborhoods. From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

When he replied to protests about the hardships caused by his road-building programs, he generally replied that succeeding generations would be grateful. It was the end that counted, not the means. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Once, in a speech, he said:

You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.

The metaphor, like most Moses metaphors, was vivid. But it was incomplete. It expressed his philosophy, but it was not philosophy but feelings that dictated Moses’ actions. He didn’t just feel that he had to swing a meat ax. He loved to swing it.

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Joe Biden’s farewell address

The delivery was less than inspiring. But the message should be taken to heart. Two excerpts:

Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.

*

You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us then about, and I quote, “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.

We all know whom he’s talking about. They’ll be there in force on Monday.

[My transcription, omitting a couple of flubbed words.]

Robert Caro, Mongol user

I found this Arnold Newman photograph by chance. It’s from 1975 and shows Robert Caro in his office, holding a Mongol pencil in his hand.

Robert Moses, the subject of Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, was once filmed with a Mongol in his hand.

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“You just open it up and you go”

John Lamberti, an LAPD homicide detective, talking about a tool specific to his profession that he really likes using. From Dan Heath’s podcast What It’s Like to Be:

“Okay, this is gonna sound crazy, but it is my notebook. It is basic, it is unapologetically analog, and I am otherwise all in on technology, and I’ve tried talking notes digitally, but I’ve yet to find a good substitute for a pen and paper. I don’t have to turn it on; I don’t have to make sure it’s charged; I don’t have to make sure it’s connected to wi-fi; it can’t shut down and reboot on me randomly. You just open it up and you go. And everything lives in my notebook: all the details from my crime scene, notes from my witness interviews, observations that I made. It’s where you capture like the raw data of the story as it’s unfolding, and it is with me every step of the way. I don’t go anywhere without my notebook.”

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[My transcription.]

Deafness, symbolic and non-

In 1950, Robert Moses’s lieutenants began to notice that the boss was going deaf. From From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

In a way, of course, Moses’ deafness was symbolic. He had, in a way, been deaf all his life — unwilling to listen to anyone, public, Mayor, Governor, deaf to all opinion save his own. But this new, physical deafness contributed in a nonsymbolic, very real way to his divorce from reality. As always, he would not attend public hearings or in any other way place himself in a situation in which he could hear the public’s views. His insulation inside a circle of men who would offer no views that were not echoes of his own further insured that no outside voices would become a part of his considerations. Now, thanks to the deafness, he was unable to hear the views, get the thinking of those administrators and public officials who were invited to lunch with him or who sat with him in conferences. Surrounded by men who would not give him the new facts and figures he needed, with no time left to rethink solutions to changing problems — most important, with no feeling that there was any reason for him to rethink — the deafness made it impossible for him to learn about the new realities even if he had wanted to.

The proof is a statement he made about golf. If there was any area in which the Robert Moses of the 1920’s had been truly expert it was in the area of recreation, in the active games which adults liked to play. But now he mentioned offhandedly that golf was not a game in which the masses were interested; it was, he said, played only by the “privileged few.” Golf was now a game played by millions in all walks of life. But Moses didn’t know this. His statement would have been true in the Twenties and he thought it was still true in the Fifties.

Because he didn’t know anything had changed.

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Some of Tom’s Typewriters

An exhibit in Sag Harbor, New York: Some of Tom’s Typewriters: From the Collection of Tom Hanks Installed by Simon Doonan. Here’s a Guardian article about the exhibit.

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[“Some typewriters” means thirty-five typewriters.]

The goods

Here is a PDF of Jack Smith’s report on the election interference case. Its concluding paragraph:

The Department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a President is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Office stands fully behind. Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency, the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.

The Contrarian

Jennifer Rubin has resigned from The Washington Post:

Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy — Donald Trump — at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.

I therefore have resigned from The Post, effective today. In doing so, I join a throng of veteran journalists so distressed over The Post’s management they felt compelled to resign.

With Norm Eisen, Rubin has launched an independent effort in journalism, The Contrarian.

[You may need to disable any content blockers to access the site and subscribe.]

Word of the day: heyday

I have sometimes wondered about the word heyday, meaning “the period of one's greatest popularity, vigor, or prosperity,” or, archaically, “high spirits.” Might heyday have something to do with haying, with jolly rustics turning work into play in the fields?

Dictionaries laugh in my face. From Merriam-Webster:

In its earliest appearances in English, in the 16th century, heyday was used as an interjection that expressed elation or wonder (similar to our word hey, from which it derives). Within a few decades, heyday was seeing use as a noun meaning “high spirits.” This sense can be seen in Act III, scene 4 of Hamlet, when the Prince of Denmark tells his mother, “You cannot call it love; for at your age / The heyday in the blood is tame....” The word’s second syllable is not thought to be borne of the modern word day (or any of its ancestors), but in the 18th century the syllable's resemblance to that word likely influenced the development of the now-familiar use referring to the period when one's achievement or popularity has reached its zenith.

And from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

late 16c. as an exclamation, an alteration of heyda (1520s), an exclamation of playfulness, cheerfulness, or surprise something like Modern English hurrah; apparently it is an extended form of the Middle English interjection hey or hei (see hey). Compare Dutch heidaar, German heida, Danish heida. Modern sense of “stage of greatest vigor” first recorded 1751 (perhaps from a notion that the word was high-day ), and it altered the spelling.

Okay, that’s enough.

“Shadows forever undispelled”

Paul Moses alleged that his brother Robert had cut him out of part of his inheritance and kept him out of city positions for which he was, as an engineer, eminently qualified. From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

The truth of Paul Moses’ charge about the inheritance will never be determined. His mother, who left it, is, of course, dead, and so, to the last man or woman, are all but one of her friends and relatives who might be in a position to verify or deny his story. The single exception, of course, is his brother. Robert Moses refuses — and has refused for forty years — to allow the subject of his mother’s will (a will, signed on her deathbed in his presence, that invalidated an earlier will that Paul says divided her estate equally among the two brothers and their sister, Edna) to be raised in his presence. The truth of Paul’s charge is, moreover, clouded further by the personality of the man who made it and by the shadows which surround certain periods of his life. Paul could have dispelled those shadows. For months, the author asked him to do so. He refused, saying it was no one’s business but his own. Finally, he said he would, at their next interview. On the day before that interview, he was stricken with his final illness. From the hospital, he telephoned the author and began the story. Before he could get more than a few sentences into it, he collapsed. Several days later, he died, leaving the shadows forever undispelled.

The charge that Robert Moses kept his brother out of city positions, Caro says, is true.

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A Bronx de Chirico

[138 East Tremont Avenue, Bronx, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

We’re in The Bronx, though at a safe distance from the path of the Cross Bronx Expressway. I chose this photograph for the strangeness of the long, sloping, vanishing building, which makes me think of Giorgio de Chirco’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. The partial face on the billboard adds another kind of strangeness. That billboard must be for Chesterfield cigarettes, whose slogan was “They Satisfy.”

This building stands today: it’s a church, the Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque Roman Catholic Church, established in 1923. Readers of James Joyce’s story “Eveline” will remember Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, who was canonized in 1920, post-Dubliners.

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Today’s Saturday Stumper

Holy moly, as my daughter would say: I found today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, incredibly easy. How can that be? Dunno. I began with a hunch and filled in 2-D, five letters, “Literally, ‘lawful.’” And then I saw 17-A, five letters, “Bayer brand,” and the game was on. By the time I hit the puzzle’s center, four or five answers at a time were asking (quietly, politely) to be filled in. The one sticking point: 44-A, three letters, “JAL Mileage Bank accrual.” I had no idea what to put in for a first letter until I looked at 44-D, three letters, “Tear down,” and ran the alphabet.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

4-D, eight letters, “Moniker for a Marine.” Not sure where I’ve ever seen it, but I knew it.

8-D, eight letters, “Fellows’ pursuits.” Good luck, fellows.

14-D, eleven letters, “Common palate cleanser.” A novel answer.

23-D, eleven letters, “Yucca cousins.” I guessed right.

24-A, eight letters, “They may accompany winks.” Cute.

34-D, four letters, “Conclusion of brief music.” Seen it before, not fooled by it.

36-D, fifteen letters, “Hottest seasonal streamer.” Just fun.

51-D, five letters, “‘Hills and valleys, ____ and fields’: Marlowe.” But “We cannot go to the country / for the country will bring us / no peace”: Williams.

60-A, four letters, “Relaxed-sounding deity.” Ha.

61-A, five letters, “Nickname like Zuzu.” No petals necessary.

64-A, four letters, “Japan is the #1 consumer and producer of them.” Oh, them.

My favorite in this puzzle: 37-D, eight letters, “Genuinely, these days.” An idiom I like, in speech and in writing. It appears four times in these pages.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“Frills”

Robert Moses objected to “frills” in public housing. The killer detail appears in a footnote, and it’s all the more powerful for being set off thusly. From The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Among “frills” Moses specifically objected to: covers on toilet bowls, doors on closets.

Something I should have linked to some time ago: a website, Robert Caro, with reviews, interviews, and early journalism.

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A little sanewashing

Kelly O’Donnell, on NBC Nightly News, last night, describing human behavior at Jimmy Carter’s memorial service:

“The thirty-ninth president brought together decades of his successors, their interactions appearing to set aside conflicts and politics and personalities. One handshake ended nearly four years of no contact between former vice president Pence and the president he served.”

But if you watch, you can also see Karen Pence refusing to acknowledge that former president and his wife. If you watch a bit more, you can see George Bush walking right past that former president before giving Barack Obama a friendly pat on the stomach.

Heather Cox Richardson has it right:

Pence shook Trump’s hand; his wife stayed seated, looking straight ahead. While Obama, sitting next to Trump, spoke to him, former president Bush refused to acknowledge Trump, instead walking past him and giving a familiar greeting to Obama.

Whose interests are served by pretending that everyone is now getting along?

A more egregious example of sanewashing, from The Washington Post: a headline that refers to Jack Smith’s report on that former president’s “election-reversal efforts.” Undoing would be more accurate.

More Nancy snow

[Nancy, February 2, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

Nancy has a change of heart when she learns that school will be closed.

It is snowing again in east-central Illinois, where schools are open, with a two-hour early dismissal. Nancy would not be pleased.

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D! S! T!

The half-time show was a celebration of daylight-savings time. “Whether it’s too dark or too light, too early or too late, it keeps us going! D! S! T! D! S! T!”

If this show had had a better director, it might have included an appearance by Grandmixer D.ST., though he has since changed his name to DXT.

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[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951).]

Links for Los Angeles

From The Late Show, four links to help Los Angeles, as found here:

California Fire Foundation Wildlife & Disaster Relief

World Central Kitchen

California Community Fund — Wildlife Recovery Fund

Pasadena Humane — Eaton Fire Emergency

And from Mary Trump:

American Red Cross of Greater Los Angeles

Golly, Moses

[From Roz Chast’s New Yorker cover “Game Show.”]

It looks like Roz Chast might have The Power Broker on her mind.

Thanks to Kevin at harvest.ink.

*

Later in the morning: I now see that on her Instagram page, Roz Chast writes, “I think about Robert Moses sometimes.”

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A Robert Caro exhibit

At the New-York Historical Society: “Turn Every Page”: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive. I like the note-to-self on the inside cover of one of Caro’s notebooks: “SHUT UP.” Because an interviewer’s silence will often, though not always, prompt a subject to say more.

Thanks to the reader whose comment on a previous post prompted me to make this post. I could’ve sworn I’d said something about this exhibit before, but no.

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Rat part

Why does this delightful story about Mark Zuckerberg have a rat part in it? Well, if the part fits.... But perhaps also because of this news item.

[Caution: the second link may not be safe for the workplace, or for anywhere else. Aiiee.]

A Staedtler Mars Lumograph

[From The Teachers’ Lounge (dir. İlker Çatak, 2023).]

A venerable pencil, on a desk in a classroom. The blur in front of the pencil: shavings.

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“Oops, Sorry”

Robert Moses, adored by the press. From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

The media, whose amplification of his statements without analysis or correction played so vital a role in making the public susceptible to the blandishments of his policies, carried out the same effective if unintentional propaganda for his personality. Continually, in five- or six-part series or Sunday-supplement feature stories or long interviews, it said he was totally honest and incorruptible, tireless in working sixteen- and eighteen-hour days for the public, and it allowed him to repeat or repeated itself the myths with which he had surrounded himself — that he was absolutely free of personal ambition or any desire for money or power, that he was motivated solely by the desire to serve the public, that, despite unavoidable daily contact with politicians, he kept himself free from any contamination by the principles of politics. His flaws reporters and editorialists made into virtues: his vituperation and personal attacks on anyone who dared to oppose him were “outspokenness”; his refusal to obey the rules and regulations of the WPA or laws he had sworn to uphold was “independence” and a refusal to let the public interest be hampered by “red tape” and “bureaucrats”; his disregard of the rights of individuals or groups who stood in the way of completion of his projects was refusal to let anything stand in the way of accomplishment for the public interest. If he insisted that he knew best what that interest was, they assured the public that was indeed the case. If there were larger, disturbing implications in these flaws — they implied that he was above the law, that the end justifies the means, and that only he should determine the end — they ignored these implications or joked about them; columnist Westbrook Pegler dubbed Moses’ technique of driving stakes without legal authorization and then defying anyone to do anything about them, the “Oops, Sorry” technique.

Westbrook Pegler? He has been called “one of the godfathers of right-wing populism.” Caro notes that Pegler called Moses “one of the greatest administrators of public office that we have ever had” and thought he’d make a good president.

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Notebooks of The Bear

They’re everywhere. I collected these from the show’s first three seasons. Click any image for a much larger view.

[Syd’s. From “Braciole” (2022). Notice too Syd’s Zebra Techo T-3 Mini Ballpoint Pen.]

[Marcus’s. From “Honeydew” (2023).]

[Carmy’s. From “Tomorrow” (2024).]

[Richie’s. From “Legacy” (2024). The page shows the beginning of a story about the chef Thomas Keller, who appears in the final episode of season three, “Forever” (2024). I can’t find any indication that the story beginning on this page is real.]

[Carmy again. From “Apologies” (2024).]

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Multitasking drains the brain

Richard Cytowic, neurologist, writes about multitasking. From “How Multitasking Drains Your Brain” (MIT Press Reader), adapted from Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload (2024) :

Keeping ourselves alert and conscious, along with shifting, focusing, and sustaining attention, are the most energy-intensive things our brain can do. The high energy cost of cortical activity is why selective attention — focusing on one thing at a time — exists in the first place and why multitasking is an unaffordable fool’s errand.

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Two January 6s

Heather Cox Richardson writes about January 6, the 2021 and 2025 varieties.

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

I knew he was in the movie, but the glasses threw me. How about you?

Leave your guess(es) in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed (and when I’m not shoveling).

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The answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
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