702–554–1465

[Updated July 8, 2010: see below.]

Lately, we’ve been getting mysterious telephone calls from “CNG” at 702–554–1465. These calls have given us useful practice speaking into a void, repeatedly. Who is CNG?

Google 702–554–1465 and you might wonder for a moment if you've met up with the telephonic equivalent of a numbers station. Other people report odd calls from this number, with no one on the other end and a constant busy signal when they try to return the calls. The number can be tracked to Searchlight, Nevada. How’s that for a cornily mysterious location?

But tonight, CNG spoke to us at last, asking if we wanted to subscribe to a nearby city’s paper. So CNG would be a call center (and my guess is that N is for Newspaper). Now the question becomes how to get off the list.

[Update, August 22, 2009: 702–554–1465 is serviced by Pac-West Telecomm, Inc. Pac-West’s number is 1–800–511–9048. When I called, I was told that Pac-West would send CNG an e-mail asking that my number be removed.

After getting yet another call, I called the paper and spoke to someone who knew nothing about Searchlight, Nevada, but who promised to look into these calls. Today I received a call from “Mobility Services” in Elkhart, Indiana. I was told that the calls are part of an eight-week promotion for 185 newspapers. I asked that my number be removed from the list. My best advice: call your local or nearly local paper(s), describe what’s happening, and ask that your number be removed.

Update, August 29, 2009: No more calls from CNG.]

[Update, July 8, 2010: A reader has passed on a name, telephone number, and e-mail address to which complaints should be directed. I’m uneasy about putting anyone’s name and e-mail address online. But here are the companies in this telemarketing venture:

Crossfire Newspaper Group: 888–852–7923
Jones Boys of Las Vegas: 702–732–4212

Thanks, reader.]

THE MAIN TITLE

[“Experimental layout by Jan Tschichold, 1948 (assisted by Erik Ellegaard Frederiksen).” From Phil Baines, The Penguin Book: A Cover Story, 1935–2005 (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 56.]

Seeing it out of context, I’d guess “Andy Warhol.”

Related reading
Richard Doubleday, Jan Tschichold at Penguin Books

Oregon

You might have been there too:

History of 19th-Century Oregon (xkcd)

(If this comic has you stumped: an explanation.)

Rashied Ali (1935–2009)

From the New York Times’ ArtsBeat Blog:

Rashied Ali, whose expressionistic, free-jazz drumming helped define the experimental style of John Coltrane’s final years, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 76.

When I was a teenager, I listened to Coltrane and Ali’s Interstellar Space (recorded in 1967, not released until 1974), again and again and again and again. Here’s a sample, via YouTube.

Julie & Julia & Russ

At a certain point in the wonderful new movie Julie & Julia, there is a plot twist so shocking the audience gasps. Julia Child does something that seems so totally out of character that even on the way out, people were still shaking their heads. “How could she?” Well, that’s one mystery I can solve. I was right there in the middle of it.

Food writer Russ Parsons tells all:

Julie, Julia and me: Now it can be told (Los Angeles Times)

A related post
Julie & Julia

Les Paul (1915–2009)

“A guitar is a great bartender, a great psychiatrist, a great mistress.”

That’s Les Paul speaking, in a years-old newspaper article that’s been sitting on my desk for a few weeks. Les Paul died today in New York.

Les Paul, Guitar Innovator, Dies at 94 (New York Times)

Health Insurance Reform Reality Check

President Barack Obama:

This isn’t about politics. This is about people’s lives. This is about people’s business. This is about our future.

The White House has created a website to combat the toxic legends in the air:

Health Insurance Reform Reality Check (whitehouse.gov)

Whatever one thinks about health care reform (I support a single-payer system), the issues can only be debated and worked out with a reality-based citizenry.

Kirk Douglas is Ulysses, on DVD

Mario Camerini’s 1954 film Ulysses is now available on DVD. I am the proud custodian of a videotape copy, rescued from a going-out-of-business video-rental store.

The film’s a hoot in any format. Kirk Douglas is a plausible Odysseus, wily to the core, though his character lacks the grumbling moodiness that befits a man of constant sorrow. In an inspired bit of casting, Silvana Mangano plays both Circe and Penelope. And Anthony Quinn is the suitors’ ringleader Antinous. Hoo boy!

A related post
Kirk Douglas (1916–2020) (With a still from the film)

Dungarees

A story in ten drawings and two photographs:

Dungarees (Caroline’s Crayons)

Walter Benjamin on readers and writers

It is a truth universally acknowledged, sort of, that we are all writers now. Walter Benjamin’s observations suggest that we were all writers “then,” too:

For centuries the situation in literature was such that a small number of writers faced many thousands of times that number of readers. Then, towards the end of the last century, there came a change. As the press grew in volume, making ever-increasing numbers of new political, religious, scientific, professional and local organs available to its readership, larger and larger sections of that readership (gradually, at first) turned into writers. It began with the daily newspapers opening their ‘correspondence columns’ to such people, and it has now reached a point where few Europeans involved in the labour process could fail, basically, to find some opportunity or other to publish an experience at work, a complaint, a piece of reporting or something similar. The distinction between writer and readership is thus in the process of losing its fundamental character. That distinction is becoming a functional one, assuming a different form from one case to the next. The reader is constantly ready to become a writer.

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. A.J. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2008), 22–23.

“The reader is constantly ready to become a writer”: as this post attests. Benjamin here, as at so many other points in this essay, is eerily relevant to our time. What he of course could not foresee was that publication itself would become the work of the everyday citizen online.