The Electric Soup Kitchen

[Life, March 11, 1940.]

What, you may ask, is the Heinz Electric Soup Kitchen? It is (or was) a gimmick to sell canned soup. From the text accompanying this little panel:

“Eating out” is like “eating in” when your favorite counter serves your favorite soup — by Heinz! For every bowlful of hale and hearty Heinz Home-style Soup is brimming with irresistible, homemade flavor Heinz chefs capture by careful, small-batch cooking. Soda fountains, luncheonettes and tea rooms from coast to coast are equipped with the Heinz Electric Soup Kitchen that facilitates prompt, speedy service of these delectable dishes. An electric soup cup heats them in two minutes!

The premise of this ad — that “eating out” should taste like “eating in” — bugs me in its appeal to the preference for what’s already familiar. If I were the man in the hat, I’d feel a bit demeaned when a customer ordered Heinz soup and not one of my delicious hamburg or liverwurst sandwiches. Sure, it’s not like I make the meat myself, but it takes a heck of a lot more skill to make a good sandwich plate than to heat up a can o’ soup. But if your idea of “eating out” is the same can you could’ve had at home, I’ll get it for you right now. Heinz soup —it’s grand! Would you like crackers with that?

[The Electric Soup Kitchen would have made a great name for a fleetingly famous rock group. I think of them as having their first (and last) LP, Spoonful (1970), on Buddah or Liberty. Yes, it was spelled Buddah.]

Plus ça change

A certain CBS Evening News anchorperson looks an awful lot like another CBS Evening News anchorperson. IMHO.

[Scott Pelley and Bob Schieffer.]

Waters, Mathis, McDowall, Axelrod, Rogers, and Evans

John Waters tells a story:

Johnny Mathis admits he does go to private events, and we both recall happily those wonderfully insane dinner party salons that the late Roddy McDowall used to give for the most bizarrely mixed guest list ever. “He included everybody,” Johnny says, laughing, and boy, did he! I remember being lucky enough to be invited there and meeting George Axelrod, and how happy I was to gush to him in person about the brilliance of his screenplay and his direction of the movie Lord Love a Duck. Then I turned around and there was an elderly couple dressed in full fringed cowboy outfits with holsters and guns. “Oh, John,” Roddy asked casually, “do you know Roy Rogers and Dale Evans?” “No,” I stammered, almost speechless. How could I? I live in Baltimore!

Role Models (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2010)

Other Lord Love a Duck posts
Blackwing pencil sighting
“[F]lapping his arms like Roddy McDowall”
Getting my ducks in a row

Glenn Gould in The Bahamas

[Glenn Gould in Nassau, The Bahamas, conducting an imaginary orchestra. From The Virtues of Hesitation (dir. Gould, 1956).]

If you’re not already a Glenn Gould fan, Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (dir. Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont, 2009) might make you one. It’s an excellent documentary, with revealing commentary from those who knew Gould best. One strange delight of Genius Within is a clip from The Virtues of Hesitation, a short 1956 film that Gould made in Nassau, The Bahamas, with writer and photographer Jock Carroll and dancer Anatole Green. Angus Carroll, Jock’s son, has put The Virtues of Hesitation online, along with the story behind the film.

Caution: the film is not exactly safe for work (I guess it depends on your employment), and it might offend contemporary sensibilities. It offers though hilarious glimpses of Glenn Gould cutting loose.

Related reading
All Glenn Gould posts

Pinboard tag cloud

Behold, a tag cloud with the top twenty tags for Orange Crate Art posts. This cloud may also be found in a more subdued form in the sidebar.

Pinboard is, in the words of its makers, “a bookmarking website for introverted people in a hurry.” I’ve been using Pinboard since December 2010 and recommend it with enthusiasm.

About those clothespins

About those clothespins:

According to the Bangor Industrial Journal, one of the most complete and extensive clothes pin factories is located at Vanceboro, Me. From the same source the process of manufacturing the pins, as carried on at the Vanceboro Wooden Ware Company’s factory, is given.

The wood used is mainly white birch and beech. . . . [Blocks of wood] are fed to the turning lathes, of which there are several — each being capable of of turning 80 pins per minute. . . .

The market for clothes pins is not confined to any special locality, but is found nearly all over the world. Ten thousand boxes have been shipped to Melbourne, Australia, within the past four months. Two firms in London carry a stock of ten thousand boxes each, and two firms in Boston carry a like amount. One thousand boxes constitute a load.

“Clothes Pins,” Scientific American, February 3, 1883.

So that’s why the history of poetry began, “quite possibly,” in 1883.

Did Nicholson Baker read this Scientific American article? I wonder. Is Vanceborough his mistake, or Paul Chowder’s? I wonder.

The related post, without which this one makes little sense
Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

Chowder speaks:

The history of poetry began, quite possibly, in the year 1883. Let me write that date for you with my Sharpie, so you can have it for your convenience. 1883. That’s when it all began. Or maybe not. Could be any year. The year doesn’t matter. Forget the year! The important thing is that there’s something called the nineteenth century, which is like a huge forest of old-growth birch and beech. That’s what they used to make clothespins out of, birch and beech. New England was the clothespin-manufacturing capital of the world. There was a factory in Vanceborough, Maine, that made eight hundred clothespins a minute in 1883. Those clothespins went out to England, to France, to Spain, to practically every country in the world. Clothes in every country were stretched out on rope to dry in the sun and held in place by New England clothespins. Elizabeth Barrett Browning probably used New England clothespins. I’m not kidding.

Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist (2009) is a novel in the form of a monologue by Paul Chowder, a poet struggling to write an introduction for an anthology of rhyming poetry. Chowder is genial, klutzy, and lonely. He is a dispenser of writing tips, a proclaimer of truths (like many poets, he knows what he knows, and he knows it’s the truth), and a slightly cracked theorist of meter. His taste in poetry is, well, his own: he loves Sara Teasdale and never “really cottoned” to John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Chowder’s skills in digression and procrastination go hand in hand: witness the sample above.

At one point in his monologue, Chowder mourns the death of good light verse. The Anthologist might be described as a good light novel: it’s a delight to read, funny and entertaining.

A related post
About the clothespins

From Lena to Rena

[“Hello Rena — Did you cut down that stump yet? Has the grass growed up again? Lena.” Postmarked August 10, 1907. Click for a larger view.]

The Railway Exchange Building, now known as the Santa Fe Building, opened in 1904. I found this postcard in an antiques store. The message — from sister to sister? — sold me.

Brian Wilson, judged by history

From an interview with Brian Wilson:

Q. How do you think you’ll be judged by history?

A. I think as a musical genius, probably.

A related post
Brian Wilson at the movies (from another interview)

Federer v. Nadal

David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, Wimbledon 2006:

Apollo and Dionysus. Scalpel and cleaver. Righty and southpaw. Nos. 1 and 2 in the world. Nadal, the man who’s taken the modern power-baseline game just as far as it goes, versus a man who’s transfigured that modern game, whose precision and variety are as big a deal as his pace and foot-speed, but who may be peculiarly vulnerable to, or psyched out by, that first man. A British sportswriter, exulting with his mates in the press section, says, twice, “It’s going to be a war.”

Federer as Religious Experience (New York Times)

At the French Open, Federer is down two sets to none as I’m typing.

11:31 a.m.: Federer won the third set.

12:06 p.m.: Nadal won the fourth set and the match.

[Disclaimer: I know zilch about tennis.]