96th and Lexington

[In a Manhattan subway station, 96th Street and Lexington Avenue. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

This post is for my dad the tileman, Jim Leddy, Leddy Ceramic Tile.

Jazz, a drug

Is jazz a drug? Of course it is; a doctor said so, in a piece called "Jazz — a Drug." He was E. Elliott Rawlins, M.D., writing in the New York Amsterdam News, April 1, 1925:

The form of music called jazz is just as intoxicating as morphine or cocaine; it is just as harmful, and yet its use is not determined by law. . . .

Jazz is killing some people; some are going insane; others are losing their religion. The young girls and boys, who constantly take jazz every day and night, are becoming absolutely bad, and some criminals. . . .

Jazz, like any other drug, should be used only when needed, in a specific dose, and by those who know how it should be used. A little jazz is all right and proper; an overdose is harmful.

Dr. Rawlins' column is a reminder that African-Americans have not always celebrated jazz as a great cultural accomplishment. Yes, the Amsterdam News, if you don't recognize the name, is an African-American newspaper, founded in 1909, still publishing weekly from Harlem.

(Thanks, Elaine!)

Stephen Dedalus' signature file

Were Stephen Dedalus living in the era of e-mail, he would have an elegant if longish signature file. Here is what he has written on the flyleaf of his geography book:

Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

In the real world, lengthy signature files on in-house e-mails always strike me as failures of tone: there's no need, really, to announce ourselves to each other in these ways. We already know who we are. The most extravagant example I've seen (not from my workplace): twenty-two lines, with seven URLs. No doubt that person's e-mails are really important.

Bloomsday

[Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses, Long Island, 1954. Photograph by Eve Arnold, via UT-Austin.]

Other Bloomsday posts
Bloomsday 2007
Bloomsday 2008

Time passes

[From Other Men's Women, dir. William A. Wellman, 1931.]

I like calendar shots in movies — such a lovely way to note time's passing. These pages remind me of the Field Notes calendars gracing the kitchen and study in my house.

Another William A. Wellman post
EATS

How to type ¢, é, and ß

A useful website, with keyboard shortcuts for typing symbols, accents, special characters, and "weird punctuation":

How to Type Symbols, Accents, and Special Characters

Florida Citrus responds

The Florida Department of Citrus has responded to Alissa Hamilton's book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice with a website, created in March, Orange Juice Facts. Well, sort-of facts: "The basic principle of orange juice processing is similar to how you make orange juice at home."

A related post
A review of Squeezed

EATS

Look at that sky. Look at that train. Look at that guy flouncing into EATS. Look at EATS.

The opening scene of Other Men's Women (dir. William K. Wellman, 1931) is a beaut. This pre-Code film focuses on a love triangle involving trainmen Bill White (Grant Withers) and Jack Kulper (Regis Toomey) and Jack's wife Lily (Mary Astor). Great lunch-counter talk, great train scenes, great rain, and one remarkable moment of desire and guilt and more desire between Withers and Astor. Joan Blondell shows up as a fast-talking waitress named Marie (just Marie), and trainman Eddie Bailey (James Cagney) sheds his work clothes to dance in evening wear across a floor. (Could this bit have inspired the bit with the dancing maître d' in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo?)

Other Men's Women is available in Volume Three of the Forbidden Hollywood Collection (TCM Archives), a set of six Wellman films and two documentaries about this relatively neglected director. Elaine and I have been on a Wellman kick all week. His films are beautifully made, their stories told with great economy and visual imagination. They are now packaged as little scandals, but they are intensely moral films, with a consistent emphasis on figuring out and then doing the right thing — which means, always, self-sacrifice. Wellman's sturdy realism and social conscience seem made for our times. Watch the homeless vets in Heroes for Sale (1933) talking over FDR's Inaugural Address and their country's future, and you'll feel right at home.

As to what's happening in that opening scene: Bill, a hard-drinking joker, has dropped off the engine for a bite to eat. He will count cars while bantering with his waitress, leaving just in time to catch the caboose and run across the tops of cars back to the engine.

Crayola madeleines

A wax museum of sorts, Crayolas through the years:

Brand Spotlight: Crayola (The Dieline, via Coudal Partners)

My madeleine: the 1964 eight-pack (but yes, I had a sixty-four pack).

Other crayon posts
Blue crayon
Early writing

Safari 4

I've been loyal to Firefox for a long time, but Apple's new Safari 4 may change that. It is blazingly fast, available for Mac and PC.