The end of the straw-hat season

According to pianist Stephen Hough, September 15 marks the end of the straw-hat season. Look at what happened on September 15 eighty-eight years ago:

In 1922 a veritable orgy of hat-smashing occurred throughout New York City. Gangs of up to a thousand men, using long sticks with wire attached, would lift off and impale the straw lids from unsuspecting heads. Police estimated that the doorway at 211 Grand Street was crammed with five hundred ruined hats.

15th September: the end of the straw hat season (Telegraph)

Sure enough, the New York Times has an article from September 16, 1922, “City Has Wild Night of Straw Hat Riots.” An excerpt:

A favorite practice of the gangsters was to arm themselves with sticks, some with nails at the tip, and compel men wearing straw hats to run a gauntlet. Sometimes the hoodlums would hide in doorways and dash out, ten or twelve strong, to attack one or two men. Along Christopher Street, on the lower west side, the attackers lined up along the surface car tracks and yanked straw hats off the heads of passengers as the cars passed.

Here at Orange Crate Art, September 30 is the last day to wear a straw hat. That’s what Linda Pagan of The Hat Shop advised when I bought a “straw” (I like saying that) earlier this summer. But I’ll be watching out for the fashion police, or gangsters.

(Thanks, Elaine!)

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Later today, Orange Crate Art will turn six. Yes, those are candles above. Which must make this post the cake. Worry not: they are slow-burning exclamation — I mean, candles.

My daughter Rachel, on a Wednesday night six years ago:

“If you’re going to be this uptight and worried about it, you’re not going to be a very happy blogger. Just say ‘This is my new blog; I’m trying it out. Thanks to my son and daughter. I hope it works out.’”

It has. Writing online brings me so much pleasure. And it does so much to make me feel like part of a large and endlessly detailed world. Thanks again, Rachel and Ben, for getting me started with the aitch tee em el. Thanks, Elaine, for your constant encouragement. Thanks, everyone, for reading.

A birthday wish: if you have a moment, please leave a comment on this post. Orange Crate Art has 5700+ subscribers, and I’d love to know: who are you all?

Recently updated

The “pre-production” Blackwing pencil, it turns out, is the finished product. Huh? I’ve updated this post accordingly: The new Blackwing pencil.

Related reading
All Blackwing posts (via Pinboard)

[Note: The comments from “Mark” that follow are the work of an employee of California Cedar, maker of the new Blackwing.]

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April 10, 2012: Only in retrospect does it occur to me to wonder: out of all possible names to choose when leaving these phony comments, why did the Cal Cedar employee chose the name Mark? Was he hoping to earn the company some good will by giving the impression that he was the well-known Blackwing fan Mark Frauenfelder?

Mark Zuckerberg and the Aeneid

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was a student of the classics, studying Latin in prep school and planning, at one point, to major in classics. (Who knew?) From a New Yorker piece by Jose Antonio Vargas:

Zuckerberg has always had a classical streak, his friends and family told me. (Sean Parker, a close friend of Zuckerberg, who served as Facebook’s president when the company was incorporated, said, “There’s a part of him that — it was present even when he was twenty, twenty-one — this kind of imperial tendency. He was really into Greek odysseys and all that stuff.”) At a product meeting a couple of years ago, Zuckerberg quoted some lines from the Aeneid. On the phone, Zuckerberg tried to remember the Latin of particular verses. Later that night, he IM’d to tell me two phrases he remembered, giving me the Latin and then the English: “fortune favors the bold” and “a nation/empire without bound.” Before I could point out how oddly applicable those lines might be to his current ambitions, he typed back:

again though these are the most famous quotes in the aeneid not anything particular that i found.

The Face of Facebook (New Yorker)

[The most famous words in the Aeneid are those that begin the poem: “Arma virumque cano,” or “I sing of arms and of a man,” in Allen Mandelbaum’s 1971 translation. (These are words in the poem, not a “quote” in the poem.) I wonder whether Zuckerberg knows about the now-gone Aeneid on Facebook project.]

Domestic comedy

At breakfast, re: a difference in pronunciation:

“We have regional dialects: your side of the table, my side of the table.”

[The speaker here was joking. Domestic comedy, not malice.]

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Illinoism
Need worked

“How to Be ‘Artsy,’ and Mean It”

“Dictionary? I don’t own a dictionary. Fouls the intuitive process.”

And other splendid things to say:

Mark Branaman and David Foster Wallace, “How to Be ‘Artsy,’ and Mean It” (The Howling Fantods)

In other news, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin celebrates the opening of the David Foster Wallace archive with a live webcast tonight, 7:00 Central.

Blackwings on the wing

News from California Cedar: “There are currently 875 dozen Palomino-Blackwing production pencils flying in from Japan,” available for purchase within two weeks. No word yet on changes (if any) from the pre-production models.

Fly hard, young Blackwings!

September 15, 2010: There are no changes. See my review for an explanation.

A related post
The new Blackwing pencil (My review)

Welcome, freshmen

“Have fun. And, uh, I will see you”: a message from Dean Fred Juilliard.

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)