"Wanting is big, having is small"

Up close everything looks smaller, especially money. This is counter to the laws of perspective — closer is bigger — but in line with the laws of desire and gratification — wanting is big, having is small.

David Barringer, "The Nine Emotions of the Working Designer," in There's Nothing Funny about Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 243.

Lady Elaine's can

Bill Madison has posted a lengthy interview with Betty Aberlin of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Aberlin's comment on Fred Rogers' sense of humor started me wondering:

In some of the earlier operas, there were some wicked puns, that later on, the icon would not have engaged in. I’m trying to think of them. There was the pineapple can opera. . . . There was some kind of lyric that was pretty double-entendre.

It so happens that we have three Mister Rogers operas in the family archives, all taped from television: Pineapples and Tomatoes (first aired in 1970), Key to Otherland (1975), and Windstorm in Bubbleland (1980). So I sat down to watch all three. And I can report that, yes, Pineapples and Tomatoes contains what seems to be an extended bit of double-entendre.

A synopsis: John Reardon plays Vice President Reardon of the Pineapple Can Telephone Company. Lady Aberlin plays the Opera Operator. X the Owl plays Benjamin Franklin. Lady Elaine Fairchilde plays herself. In the first scene, as VP Reardon, Miss Aberlin, and Ben Franklin chat over pineapple juice, an angry call comes in from Lady Elaine Fairchilde. She doesn't like the company's pineapple cans. Says Reardon, "She likes tomatoes better." He goes off to see her. The double-entendre turns up in an exchange between them:

VP Reardon: May I see your pineapple can, Lady?

Lady Elaine: Here it is, my lovely can.

VP Reardon: And where is the picture of the pineapple?

Lady Elaine: On the other side.

VP Reardon: I'd like to check it please.

Lady Elaine: I'd rather you didn't.

VP Reardon: Lady, may I check your can?

Lady Elaine: You may if you can.

It turns out that Lady Elaine has placed a picture of a tomato on her can. It's not that she likes to eat tomatoes or feel them or smell them: she just likes the color red.

VP Reardon returns to the telephone company; Lady Elaine follows; and Ben Franklin, it turns out, has saved the day, by inventing new colors for the company's cans. Yes, red is one such color. VP Reardon and Miss Aberlin confess their love for one another, and thus the opera ends.

The canned humor in the above exchange is charming, as is the play on can and may. (Can I stay up till ten? Please? Yes, you can, but no, you may not.)

According to the Wikipedia article on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, there were thirteen Neighborhood operas. Why they haven't been issued on DVD as a boxed-set is beyond me. Until the real thing comes along, you can watch some of Pineapples and Tomatoes on YouTube, a transfer from somebody else's old videotape: Part One, Part Two.

Another Mister Rogers post
Blaming Mister Rogers

Cambridge T. party

While vacationing last week, Elaine and I met a fellow writer from the Internet — T., who blogs at Notes of an Anesthesioboist. We met T. and her husband (Mr. T., natch) for lunch at The Elephant Walk, a Cambodian-French restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two-and-a-half hours later, we parted, after some fine food and fine conversation.

As one who came of age (whatever that means) before life online, I'm always (still) amazed by the ways in which the Internet makes possible such opportunities. My first meetup! Thanks, T., for a great party.

Things I learned on my summer vacation (2009)

In Cloverdale, Indiana, McDonald's sells SWEET TEA and UNSWEET TEA. That's how the urns are labeled.

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Ella Logan sang "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" in Finian's Rainbow. Jazz singer Annie Ross is Logan's niece.

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Stephen Stills' "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" is a hilariously improbable choice for a sing-along.

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Gsus7 is a chord symbol, not part of the lyrics of "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes."

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WKCR's Phil Schaap is as gloriously redundant as ever: "the cornet, or trumpet-like instrument."

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Jean Dubuffet's Labonfam abeber (1950) is a book of erotic pen-and-ink drawings accompanied by a polylingual nonsense text. It was published in an edition of fifty.

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Unagi is delicious. Unagi is eel. (Thanks, Luanne and Jim!)

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The Elephant Walk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, serves elegant Cambodian cuisine. The avocado citrus soup is a dazzling combination of flavors. (Thanks, T. and Mr. T.!)

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The phở at Zenna Noodle Bar in Brookline, Massachusetts, is dinner in a bowl.

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Vietnamese coffee, made with condensed milk, is delicious. (Here's a how-to.). Was the coffee butter-roasted? Our waiter didn't know.

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Brookline Booksmith is a great bookstore, even better now that a nearby Barnes and Noble is gone. It is exciting to walk into a bookstore on a Tuesday night and find it crowded with paying customers. The moral of the story: if you have a great (or good) bookstore, don't use it as a library or as a source of information for Amazon purchases. Buy books.

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Overheard: "Dating a sixth-grader is social suicide!" Spoken by a seventh-grader in Brookline, who also explained that she was waiting for another seventh-grader to "sprout up" before she would agree to go out with him.

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Samson Raphaelson wrote Day of Atonement, a play that became the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer (1927). Raphaelson also worked on Trouble in Paradise (1932), a film Elaine and I both love. It turns out that we know someone who knew Samson Raphaelson.

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The downstairs men's room in the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline displays a Simplex 35-millimeter projector. Nothing comparable in the ladies' (I am told).

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Mass-transit in Boston and New York is a thing of beauty — clarity, cleanliness, and courtesy everywhere. In New York, one stands to the right on the escalator, leaving a passing lane for those walking their way up the machine. "There are a lot of unspoken rules here," said one commuter.

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In Newton Highlands, Massachusetts, Paul Gilbert & Daughters are general contractors. I'd never before seen "& Daughters" on a sign.

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Boorishness knows no distinctions. In Pennsylvania, young louts slalomed through closed-lane markers and threw a lit firecracker at our car. In Cambridge, a well-dressed man in his forties stepped from the Harvard Bookstore and spat a great gob of mucus onto the brick pavement, about two feet from where I stood waiting to meet Elaine. I looked the guy in the eye, to no effect. He crossed Massachusetts Avenue to talk on his cellphone just inside Harvard Yard.

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It is important to notice the grace and resilience with which people meet the cruel, stupid insults of old age.

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A wise traveler brings a jacket, even if it's June. That way he will not find himself standing in a Gap Outlet five minutes before closing time, trying to decide what to buy.

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Elaine: "If you look hard enough for a brown hat, you'll find three."

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Without regular news-checks via Internet, I miss most of what's happening in the world. (I began catching up this afternoon.)

More things I learned on my summer vacation
2006
2007
2008

Happy Father's Day

I'm no longer sure where I found this image. I've been waiting almost a year to post it.

Happy Father's Day to dads everywhere, hipster- and non-.

[Illustration by Ernie Bushmiller, creator of Nancy.]

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