Dinner tables

[Bigger Than Life, dir. Nicholas Ray, 1956. Click for a larger view.]


[American Beauty, dir. Sam Mendes, 1999. Click for a larger view.]

No, I don’t think it’s coincidence either.

Bigger Than Life is the story of Ed Avery (James Mason), a husband and father and teacher who changes in terrifying ways under the influence of cortisone. This film has been characterized as a story of rebellion against the conformity of 1950s America, but I don’t see it that way. Ed Avery becomes, if anything, an extreme embodiment of suburban values: a father who insists that his son work hard, and harder, and harder still; a husband who buys and charges, buys and charges, so that his family can have the best. There’s much more — and much worse — than that. Like Lester Burnham of American Beauty, Ed Avery too “rules.” Lester though rules a kingdom of his mind. Ed rules over his family, a patriarchal tyrant who allows no challenge to his authority.

One great bit of dialogue, as Lou Avery (Barbara Rush) and son Richie (Christopher Olsen) talk about what’s happening to Dad:

“You and I must be very careful not to upset him. Just keep on loving him with all our hearts no matter what he does.”

“Sure, Mom. I just didn’t get it.”

Yes, they’re sinners in the hands of an angry God.

Bigger Than Life, beautifully restored, is available from the Criterion Collection. Film Forum has made available Berton Roueché’s “Ten Feet Tall,” the 1955 New Yorker piece that inspired the film. (It’s long gone.)

One more Blackwing review

Pencil Revolution (back online) has a pre-review of the pre-production Blackwing pencil: “darker than a 4B Faber-Castell 9000, and smoother to boot.”

A related post
The new Blackwing pencil (My review)

David Foster Wallace

February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008

[B]ut by then it was too late, when it wouldn’t stop and they couldn’t make it the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child’s body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self’s soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.

David Foster Wallace, “Incarnations of Burned Children,” in Oblivion (New York: Little, Brown, 2004).

[Photograph by Gary Hannabarger.]

Some Infinite Jest posts
Attention : Description : Loveliness : “Night-noises” : Romance : Sadness : Telephony : Television

Another review of the new Blackwing

Pencil talk has a discerning review of pre-production samples of the Palomino Blackwing pencil. Great photographs too.

A related post
The new Blackwing pencil (My review)

Chock full o’Nuts!

Chock full o’Nuts returns to New York!

Related posts
Chock full o’Nuts (Remembrance of things past)
Chock full o’Nuts lunch hour (An Alfred Eisenstadt photograph)
New York, 1964: Chock Full o’Nuts (From Hart’s Guide to New York City)

Irwin Silber (1925–2010)

Irwin Silber, founder and longtime editor of the folk-music magazine Sing Out!, has died:

Mr. Silber borrowed the title from the third verse of “The Hammer Song” (later known as “If I Had a Hammer”), written in 1949 by [Pete] Seeger and [Lee] Hays, with its refrain “I’d sing out danger, I’d sing out a warning, I’d sing out love between all my brothers (and my sisters) all over this land.”

Irwin Silber, Champion of the Folk Music Revival, Dies at 84 (New York Times)

Philippe Petit on the past and present tenses

Philippe Petit:

Eleven years ago, when my young daughter died without warning, the dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, the Very Rev. James Parks Morton, came to my side. He offered me guidance from his heart, but quite commandingly: “Speak of her in the present; you must not use the past tense!”

When asked today, “Do you have children?” I answer, “Yes, I have a daughter named Gypsy. She is 9 1/2 years old, and no longer alive.”

So are my twin towers, our twin towers, gone, yet still standing tall, made of thin air, yet gloriously defying the sunset on this warm late summer evening.

Look at them!

From “My Towers, Our Towers” (Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2003)

Andrew Sullivan, telling it like it is

At The Daily Dish:

Religious warfare, once begun, is hard to stop; and when it is tacitly endorsed by a political party many of whose members believe that the president is a Muslim and no one in the GOP directly attacks, rebuts and discredits this nonsense, we are in very dangerous territory.

Cheating and psychopathy

From a summary of research published by the American Psychological Association:

Students who cheat in high school and college are highly likely to fit the profile for subclinical psychopathy — a personality disorder defined by erratic lifestyle, manipulation, callousness and antisocial tendencies . . . .

College students who admitted to cheating in high school or turned in plagiarized papers ranked high on personality tests of the so-called Dark Triad: psychopathy, Machiavellianism (cynicism, amorality, manipulativeness), and narcissism (arrogance and self-centeredness, with a strong sense of entitlement).

Read more:

Personality predicts cheating more than academic struggles, study shows (American Psychological Association)

“Barthes’s Hand”

At the New Yorker: four samples of Roland Barthes’s handwriting. (He was using a fountain pen.)