For sale, in St. Charles, Illinois: Brian Wilson’s former house, with nine fireplaces, six full bathrooms, five bedrooms, two half-bathrooms, and one underground recording studio. A newspaper reports that the studio is not in use: “‘It’s just space,’ said the resident who answered the door there last week.“
Wilson lived in St. Charles briefly, where he worked on the Imagination album (1998) with producer Joe Thomas. In Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys: The Complete Guide to Their Music (2004), Andrew G. Doe and John Tobler write that Wilson spent “maybe a total of three months in the house” and later sold it.
Beach Boy's former St. Charles house for sale (Daily Herald)
5N129 Dover Hill Road, St. Charles, Illinois (Caldwell Banker)
Monday, July 25, 2011
Brian Wilson’s former house for sale
BBC on podcasts
From the BBC: Podcasts: Who still listens to them?
The answer would seem to be “Lots of people.” The point of the article is that interest in podcasts continues to grow, though Facebook and Twitter get more attention.
Me, I barely keep up with three podcasts: Joe Bussard’s Country Classics, This American Life, and To the Best of Our Knowledge. How about you?
[“Facebook and Twitter”: I find it difficult to use the term social media without wincing.]
Night Train to Munich
How is it that Night Train to Munich (dir. Carol Reed, 1940) is so little known? It’s brilliant, in the colloquial British sense of that word — amazing, fantastic. The film moves at the speed of early Hitchcock and has a little of everything: betrayal, comedy, espionage, friendship, unconvincing model landscapes, pursuit, romance, secret messages, song, suspense, and train travel.
Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the clear inspiration — easy to understand, as Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder wrote both screenplays. Margaret Lockwood returns, here as a young Czech who follows her scientist-father in fleeing the Nazis to England; Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, traveling home from a visit to Berlin, reprise their roles as Charters and Caldicott. Best of all is a plot element that owes nothing to the earlier film: a tricky triangle with Lockwood, Rex Harrison, and Paul Henreid. In the train-lavatory scene above, Harrison, impersonating a Nazi officer, gets the warning that the real Nazis are onto him.
Night Train to Munich is available, beautifully restored, from the Criterion Collection.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Six stars
After Long Wait, Same-Sex Couples Marry in New York (New York Times)
Mississippi John Hurt for Chevy
Flipping through channels, I was surprised to hear the guitar and voice of Mississippi John Hurt in a Chevrolet commercial. Hurt’s fingerpicking style has turned up in commercials before: with products like coffee and lemonade, the sound signifies “old-time goodness” (and rightly so, no matter the quality of the product advertised). To my knowledge, the Chevy commercial marks the first time Hurt himself has been heard in a commercial, in a 1963 Library of Congress recording of “You Are My Sunshine,” played in C position, with the guitar tuned two whole-steps down.
I suspect that someone at the ad agency really, really loves Hurt’s music: note that the African-American dad in the commercial (ten seconds in) is wearing a hat that resembles Hurt’s signature fedora, dark brown with a tan band. Hardly coincidental, I’d say.
Why Maxwell House has never used Hurt’s “Coffee Blues” in a commercial is beyond me: “Ain’t Maxwell House all right!”
A related post
Mississippi John Hurt (From Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest)
Related reading
Mississippi John Hurt Museum
[Yes, The Lovin’ Spoonful took their name from “Coffee Blues.”]
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Garner on writing in law school
Bryan A. Garner, in a New York Times forum on law school:
Most legal scholarship is poorly written and is mired in nonpractical abstraction that few can understand and fewer still can benefit from. Most law professors don’t know how to write well, so they could hardly teach the subject if they wanted to. On top of that, lawyers of all kinds — both academic lawyers and practicing ones — rationalize their linguistic ineptitude by claiming that legal jargon is necessary (most of it isn’t); that writing instruction is elementary, remedial stuff (it should progress to advanced techniques); and that writing style doesn’t matter anyway. But it does matter: clear writing equates with clear thinking, and judges and employers cry out for both. Put all these things together, and you have serious educational pathologies.Garner’s suggested start toward a cure: “much more research, writing and editing,” with frequent short papers (revision required) in all second- and third-year classes.
Note, by the way, how well Garner writes.
[Garner recommends the Oxford comma. The Times must be responsible for "research, writing[,] and editing.”]
Friday, July 22, 2011
Norway
The news from Norway grows grimmer as we learn more:
Blasts and Gun Attack in Norway; 7 Dead (New York Times)
I have friends in Oslo and would really like to know that they’re okay.
(They are.)
Counterfeit-coin puzzle
From Futility Closet: “You have nine coins and a balance scale. One of the coins is lighter than the others. Is it possible to identify it in only two weighings?”
(via Boing Boing)
Ladies and gentlemen, Ethel Waters
It’s so hot,From 1933, Ethel Waters sings Irving Berlin’s “Heat Wave.”
A chicken laid an
Egg on the street — and it fried!
Pale King review
The July-August 2011 issue of World Literature Today has my review of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King. It’s a short review, but it makes several points I’ve seen nowhere else. (And they’re good ones.) The link is to the journal’s website; the review is in print (pages 70–71), and online via subscribing libraries.
Waiting on a copy of The Pale King and ignoring all discussion of the book until after I’d written a review made for a strange adventure in not-reading. No spoilers!
Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)
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