WEAPONS ARE PROHIBITED.

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Leaving the Saint Louis Art Museum yesterday, I had to take a picture of this sign just inside the front doors. The sign isn’t art, just a straightforward announcement of what I suppose had always been a tacit rule of museum-going.

Overheard

At the Saint Louis Art Museum’s exhibit of Monet’s Agapanthus triptych, in a little room where some silent footage of the painter ran in a loop, accompanied by a recording of Debussy’s “Claire de lune,” a grandmother spoke loudly to her granddaughters, who might have been three and five:

“Smoking cigarettes is very bad for you. If he hadn’t smoked cigarettes, he would have lived a lot longer. You don’t want to smoke cigarettes.”

The footage was of Monet at work, a long-ashed cigarette hanging from his lips. He died of lung cancer at the age of eighty-six.

The Agapanthus triptych was a disappointment, though Elaine and I were happy that we shared in the disappointment. (“I’m so glad we have the same taste in art,” said she.) We saw so many far more vibrant and engaging paintings yesterday — by Kline, Motherwell, Pissarro, van Gogh, and Monet himself, among others. The triptych felt more like painting-by-the-yard, or background music. The dark-grey walls and dim lighting didn’t help matters. Nor did the array of merch that waited just beyond the triptych, everything from CDs of French pop music to Monet refrigerator magnets.

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (via Pinboard)

Zenith All-Speed Record Changer

[Life, August 28, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

There’s something poignant about the prepared-for-all-eventualities mindset that this turntable is meant to satisfy:

First and only changer that plays any speed record now made or yet to come, 10 R.P.M. to 85 . . . with two simple controls a six-year-old can operate.

Record lovers— here is the changer that sets you free forever from the nightmare of speeds, sizes, attachments and adjustments!

Zenith engineers, who revolutionized record reproduction with the world-famous Cobra® Tone Arm, have now brought you an automatic changer — the new “Cobra-Matic” — so unbelievably simple that you simply won’t believe it until you operate it yourself!

You touch one control knob — and set it for any size record — 7, 10 or 12 inch! You touch the other control knob — and set it for any speed! Yes, for 33 1/3, 45, 78, or any speed from 10 R.P.M. to 85 that the modern world may dream up! You can play them all — with one marvelous new Super-Cobra Tone Arm — not even a needle to adjust, not even one single attachment to fuss with!

And what a glorious outpouring of tone will greet your ears! Zenith’s new Super-Cobra, resting a mere 1/5 of an ounce on the record, brings out new tonal beauty against a background of velvety quiet. Reproduces music on a Radionic wave like no other method you have ever seen or heard!

Now — at last — you can buy a phonograph without fear that it will be obsolete. You can be sure that in a Zenith® you possess the last word in tonal magnificence and the simplest way ever devised for automatic record playing. See you Zenith dealer today, and see for yourself!

New “Cobra-Matic” Changer Now on All Zenith Radio-Phonographs and Television Combinations

Poking fun at this ad’s assumptions — that while speeds might vary, records would always come in three sizes; that an analog control knob would allow for precision in choosing a speed — seems tactless. I’d rather admire the mid-century confidence that a turntable would be forever. And in a way, it would be: there are still (for practical purposes) just three sizes and three speeds. The changes that the Cobra-Matic was meant to accommodate never showed up, though disruptive technologies did.

Mitt/Mark Romney/Trail

I am increasingly certain that Mitt Romney is really D-list cartoon hero Mark Trail. Think about it: have you ever seen them together?

Well, have you?

[Mark Trail, October 11, 2011.]

Well-punctuated wine

Dig the careful punctuation on the Smoking Loon label:

“Besides his bein’ kinda crazy, they called him the Smoking Loon ’cause he was so dam’ efficient,” Jake began, stubbing out his cigar. “He’d take care of business an’ get in an’ out before anybody’d see him comin’ … leavin’ no trace ’cept the lingerin’ sound of his eerie, loon-like cackle. No one was really sure who he was or who he worked for, but when word got out someone needed his services, the Smoking Loon just appeared on their doorstep, like outta thin air or somethin’.”

It’s the ’.” at the end that gets me. It’s good wine too.

[Thanks for the wine, Martha.]

The Oxford typo

I know the text above is small: I scanned it so that there could be no question about the accuracy of my transcription, which follows:

18. In an article in the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, June 18, 2007, by line Penny Wolfe. Brown was listed as House’s 77-year-old son-in-law, but he was his ‘step’-son-in-law having been married to one of Evie Goff’s daughters by her first marriage. Even that relationship is complicated since both of Evie natural daughters, Bea and Sally, moved to Detroit in the late forties.

Daniel Beaumont, Preachin’ the Blues: The Life and Times of Son House (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

How many ways does this footnote go wrong?

1. By line should be one word: byline.

2. “Brown was listed as House’s 77-year-old son-in-law, but he was his ‘step’-son-in-law”: slight pronoun trouble. A better way to manage it: “Listed as House’s 77-year-old son-in-law, Brown was in truth a ‘step’-son-in-law.”

3. It’s not clear where Brown is “listed.” If the period after Penny Wolfe’s name is supposed to be a comma, it would be more accurate to say that Brown is identified, &c.

4. Commas are missing after ‘step’-son-in-law and complicated. Punctuation is a problem throughout the book, with necessary commas often missing after introductory subordinate clauses, before and after non-restrictive modifiers, and from citations.

5. The apostrophe and s are missing from Evie natural daughters.

6. Commercial-Appeal might be a mistake. Every reference I’ve seen to the newspaper elsewhere (from the recent and distant past) has the name without a hyphen.

Carelessness runs through this biography of Son House; this footnote is just an especially glaring example. Ought a reader to expect more from a university press? From Oxford University Press? I would think so. Preachin’ the Blues has some good stories of Son House’s life and some excellent photographs. But the writing, the writing. And the editing, the editing. I’m glad I borrowed this one from the library.

If you’ve never heard Son House, here’s a great place to start.

[Post title with apologies to the Oxford comma.]

Kern Type

Great fun: Kern Type, a kerning game (via Coudal).

Hint: all letters except the first and last letters of each word can be moved.

[Now back to work.]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, October 11, 2011.]

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.

There are many ways to draw a plausible refrigerator, but they’re all missing from the above panel. Perhaps the beer is in a cooler in the basement?

The old can-I-borrow-a-cup-of-sugar routine isn’t very plausible either.

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All Hi and Lois posts (via Pinboard)
Lois and refrigerators (more problems)

[With apologies to T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker.”]

Goodbye, Qwikster

That was fast.

A related post
Netflix messes up

Missing the obivous

I miss the obvious all the time. See the typo in the title of this post? Obvious, isn’t it?

But on a more serious note: I just realized that I’ve been missing something in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) that now seems ridiculously obvious. I first saw Vertigo in 1984 and have seen it many times since. I’d say that Vertigo is my favorite film. But I think I’ve misunderstood the relationship between John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) and Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), which has seemed to me a matter of close friends of many years standing. One line of dialogue makes me now think that I’m wrong: “How’s your love life, Midge?”

If Scottie is in the habit of dropping in on Midge, wouldn’t he know, at least sort of? This question could be a matter of awkward exposition, a way to introduce the subject of Scottie and Midge’s past relationship. But here’s what I think is going on. We know that Scottie and Midge were close in college. As Scottie recalls, they were engaged — for “three whole weeks,” as Midge adds. They later (I now think) drifted apart. The death of the police officer who falls from a rooftop in the film’s opening scene has made the news, along with Scottie, who clung to a gutter, paralyzed by acrophobia, as the man fell. Midge (I now think) has seen this news and gotten in touch, feeling tenderness and pity and hoping to rekindle their relationship. More dialogue from Scottie and Midge’s first scene:

“Aren’t you ever gonna get married?”

“You know there’s only one man in the world for me, Johnny-O.”

This exchange too is not what one would expect between close friends of long standing.

Later in the film, Midge leaves a note under Scottie’s door asking “Where are you?” When Scottie drops in, she explains: “I just thought that if I gave you a drink and fed you some dinner, you’d be so grateful you’d take me to a movie.” Awkward and self-abasing, she’s making a play for him. No soap: Scottie’s already in a movie. It is under the direction of Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) and stars a woman named Madeleine (Kim Novak).

[“We were engaged once, weren’t we?” Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge Wood.]