Stolen Mongols

News from the Telegraph:

Cartrain, a 17-year-old graffiti artist embroiled in a feud with Damien Hirst, has been arrested after stealing pencils from the millionaire artist’s latest installation. . . .

Cartrain visited Hirst’s installation Pharmacy in July, which was being shown as part of Tate Britain’s Classified exhibition until it closed last month, and removed a few of the rare “Faber Castell dated 1990 Mongol 482 Series” pencils.

Cartrain then created a parody police poster.

According to the real police, the Metropolitan Police, the pencils, part of a £10 million installation, are worth £500,000. £500,000 for Mongols? It’s not as if they’re Blackwings.

A related post
Mongol No. 2 3/8

Outsourcing worry

Stanley Auster (b. 1928) is the grandson of Louis Auster, the man oral historian Jeff Kisseloff describes as “the patriarch of the Lower East Side’s first family of egg creams.” Stanley’s father Julius was also in the business:

He always smoked a lot of cigars. Typically, you would see him behind the counter with his foot up on a low shelf, puffing away, completely satisfied. He was always completely free of worry. Honestly, he never seemed to be preoccupied with anything. I was just the opposite. I was always worried about everything. One day when I was about ten, I asked him about it.

“Daddy, why don’t you ever worry?”

He thought for a moment, and then he said, “If I tell you, do you promise not to tell anybody?”

“Yeah.”

“I have someone who worries for me.”

“What do you mean?”

He had a friend, little Ike. They both loved cigars and they were inseparable. They didn’t talk much, but they liked being together. Ikey was out of work most of the time, but somehow he could afford those cigars.

My father explained it to me. “Little Ike and I have an understanding. Anytime something bothers me, I tell it to Little Ike, and he says he will worry about it. I tell him these things, and the moment I tell him, it’s over. I wipe it out of my mind, and Ike takes care of it.”

He was serious. He then suggested that when I get older I should find someone. “It’s worth it. I pay him for it.”

He actually paid Little Ike to worry for him, and that was how Ike could afford his cigars. It was what you call a symbiotic relationship.

Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 64–65.

Outsourcing worry! I wish I’d thought of it. But whom to hire? How much to pay? And how to be sure the job would get done?

[Note: A comment from Howard Henner on a 2008 New York Times egg-cream story states that Louis Auster’s original recipe for chocolate syrup is known now only to Henner and his cousin Stanley Auster. Stanley Auster, I take it, is still with us. I wish I knew where I learned about Jeff Kisseloff’s book, a few months ago.

Now I know: at Tom the Piper’s Son.]

“A song is an intimation of immortality”

Van Dyke Parks, in an interview with an Australian newspaper:

“A song is an intimation of immortality, sometimes approached with piety, sometimes approached with vanity but generally the latter. Always feel that there is a reason to be doing this that survives that judgment call: an alternative something.”

Parks is of course borrowing from William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Wordsworth is also a source for “Child Is Father of the Man,” from the Wilson–Parks collaboration SMiLE.

Van Dyke Parks is a speaker at the Big Sound 2009 music conference next week in Australia.

Read more:

Eternal life of the song (WA Today)

Dang

The word of the day and of the day before this one and of the day before that one and of the one before that is dang. Since Monday, Elaine and I have been saying dang. Just for fun. It is the week of the dang. (We make our own fun.)

I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, hoping for a history of the word rich and strange. But no. The verb steps on stage in the 1790s: “A euphemistic substitute for DAMN.” The noun follows in 1906: "A damn, cuss." A few sample sentences, and that’s it.

Dang.

Re: Schaefer

If anyone knows a good remedy to remove the Schaefer jingle from a human head, please advise.

A related post
SCHAEFER

SCHAEFER

The clue for 18 Across in today’s New York Times crossword — “‘The one beer to have when you’re having more than one’ sloganeer” — brings back the past. The answer (in crossword caps): SCHAEFER.

When the world was young, Schaefer Beer was everywhere. The Schaefer slogan, which formed the opening and closing lines of a compelling jingle, played a part even in my life as a third-grader. Our teacher, Roslyn Vistreich, Mrs. Vistreich, had assigned us the task of bringing in and telling a joke for the class. Mine:

Why did the doctor tell the expecting mother to drink Schaefer?

Because she was having more than one.

That’s funny — in at least a couple of ways. But Mrs. Vistreich was not amused. I was already on her bad side, being a clock-watcher, staircase talker, and whistler. The joke didn’t help. No joke.

Related reading
Schaefer Beer (Wikipedia)

Mr. White’s neighborhoods

E.B. White on New York City neighborhoods, each a few blocks long, each with its own drugstore, grocery store, liquor store, newsstand, shoe-repair place, and so on:

So complete is each neighborhood, and so strong the sense of neighborhood, that many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land and will feel uneasy till he gets back.

Shopkeepers are particularly conscious of neighborhood boundary lines. A woman friend of mine moved recently from one apartment to another, a distance of three blocks. When she turned up, the day after the move, at the same grocer’s that she had patronized for years, the proprietor was in ecstasy — almost in tears — at seeing her. “I was afraid,” he said, “now that you’ve moved away I wouldn’t be seeing you any more.” To him, away was three blocks, or about seven hundred and fifty feet.

From Here Is New York (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 29–30.

This essay in book form would be a wonderful gift for anyone hailing from or headed to the city. Never mind that White was writing in 1948. As he says in a foreword, the New York that he has described had already become a matter of the past by the time his book was published. It’s the reader’s job, he says, “to bring New York down to date,” though in a final dark meditation on Manhattan’s vulnerability to attacking planes, White has done the job for us.

Here Is New York is available again in hardcover, from The Little Bookroom. It’s this book I had in mind when I wrote last month that I pass up books that I would’ve bought without hesitation in the past. Maybe I’ll still get a copy. (But for now: thanks, library.)

A tip to speed up Firefox

I thought that when I switched to a Mac, I was done with defragmenting. But not entirely: Firefox (on any platform) seems to show significant improvement in speed after one defragments the Places database, the home of Bookmarks and History, like so:

1. Click on Tools, then Error Console.

2. Type the following (without returns) into the Code box:

3. Click on Evaluate.

Or install the “experimental” extension Vacuum Places Improved, which does the work for you on a regular basis.

Further reading
Speed up Firefox with VACUUM (Oremj’s Blog)

Enric Jardí on type

With its right-side-up and upside-down dual front covers, Enric Jardí’s Twenty-Two Tips on Typography (That Some Designers Will Never Reveal) / Twenty-Two Things That You Should Never Do with Typefaces (That Some Designers Will Never Tell You) (Barcelona/New York: Actar, 2007) is a cleverly designed two-in-one presentation of common-sense do’s and don’t’s about document design. Alas, Jardí’s advice is often undercut by an awkward translation from the Spanish. For instance:

It is often useful that these kinds of formulas have a fixed scale of element sizes beforehand. . . . However, it does occur that sometimes it is hard to see things even if they are exactly the planned size and in the place marked by the guidelines.

Even worse is a level of carelessness that suggests the absence of editing and proofing — sentence fragments, missing punctuation, even this sentence:

Look for contrast: itit iss better to have two very different typefaces than typefaces that “match.”

It’s even better though to correct typos.

Jardí’s advice is worth reading, but this book in its present form isn’t worth $24.95. Better to borrow (as I did) from a library.

A Mad Men sort of man, sort of

This man has been around for a while. The “Common Sense” Traveler’s Expense Book in which he stars has a 1989 calendar on its back cover and a 1970 copyright. The hat and overcoat and the line per day for telephone and telegram expenses suggest perhaps a still earlier origin.

In 2009, this wayfaring stranger is still making his way, still working for Beach Publishing Co., still with an automobile growing from his arm. His grandfather worked for Beach too. Grandson is now hoping for a small role in Mad Men.

What? There are no small roles? Only small actors? Then he’s your man, less than 2.5 inches tall. It’d be easy to find a place for him.

I found this “Common Sense” Traveler’s Expense Book some years ago in a stationery store, long after the 1989 calendar on the back cover was past its expiration date.

[This post is the sixth in an occasional series, “From the Museum of Supplies.” The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real. Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items.]

Also from the Museum of Supplies
Real Thin Leads
Rite-Rite Long Leads
Mongol No. 2 3/8
Dennison's Gummed Labels No. 27
Fineline erasers