Cello exceptions?

Jim Fleming, on To the Best of Our Knowledge: “It’s a truism in the rock-music industry: if you want to make a sad song, put a cello in it.”

I can think of one flagrant exception to this rule — a song that’s anything but sad in which a cello plays a significant role. And there must be others. Your suggestions are welcome in the comments. (Spoiler alert: mine’s there too.)

Proust in Miami

In Miami, sixteen old folks finish reading Proust. I love it.

Make Way for Tomorrow

[Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore.]

Bookkeeper Barkley Cooper (Victor Moore), hasn’t worked in four years. He’s not retired, just out of a job: the Depression is on. But something will come along. Bark’s wife Lucy (Beulah Bondi) is sure of it, or at least she says she is. Bark and Lucy, both in their seventies, have been married for fifty years. With no income and no pension, they have lost their house to the bank. Now what? How will their children help them? Hard times, for these times: Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) is eerily contemporary in its examination of the effects of economic extremity on family relationships.

This film could have been made as a sappy picture of cute clashes between generations: Grandma and Grandpa move in. Hilarity ensues. Instead, Leo McCarey, probably best known for Going My Way (1944), gives us an intimate depiction of displacement and isolation in old age. Bark and Lucy move in, but not together: circumstances require that they live apart for the first time in their married life, each with a different child. The old people are out of place and in the way in their new quarters, and the film makes us feel their awkwardness. The creak of a rocking chair makes Lucy a distraction during her daughter-in-law’s evening of cards: the furniture itself calls attention to an interloper’s presence. A storekeeper reads to Bark (whose glasses are broken) a heartbreaking letter from Lucy, and we understand that Bark must have been unwilling to share the letter — whatever it might have to say — with the daughter who’s taken him in. Yet the Coopers’ children are hardly monstrous: obtuse and selfish, certainly, but not wicked. Indeed, the film makes it clear that having either Bark or Lucy in the house would be trying.

In an interview accompanying the film’s Criterion release, Peter Bogdanovich recalls Orson Welles saying that Make Way for Tomorrow “would make a stone cry.” And for various reasons. The film’s final twenty-six minutes chart five hours of a Bark and Lucy reunion — a late afternoon and evening in Manhattan as they revisit the world of their younger days, walking in Central Park, dining in the hotel where they honeymooned. How delightful these old people seem to those who aren’t their children. And now what? You’ll have to see for yourself.

Make Way for Tomorrow is available, beautifully restored, from the Criterion Collection. It is, I’d venture, Leo McCarey’s finest hour and a half.

[Hard Times: For These Times, the full title of Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel.]

On interests and teaching

Gary Gutting:

Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting. It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have. Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting.

What Is College For? (New York Times)

Domestic comedy

“There are two kinds of people: those who are punctual and those who — where are they?”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (via Pinboard)

namebench

The Google Code project namebench (no cap) is an “open-source DNS benchmark utility” for OS X, UNIX, and Windows. It finds the fastest DNS servers for your computer.

If you poke around a bit online, you’ll find a folkloric consensus that Google Public DNS and similar services are faster than an ISP’s DNS. I switched to Google’s DNS in 2009, and the difference in speed was indeed great. But now namebench tells me that my ISP’s DNS is faster. Because more people are now using Google’s DNS? Beats me. At any rate, I’ve switched back. And yes, my ISP’s DNS is faster. PDQ. QED.

They don’t write ’em like this anymore

“The entire ballet is running away, and I am mired in this insignificant little speck on the map!”

William Conrad as Major Anatole Karzof, in “Death Takes a Curtain Call.” This episode of Murder, She Wrote first aired on December 16, 1984.

Related reading
Stubbs’s Corollary

Brian Wilsons

Brian Wilson, September 2011, on the Beach Boys’ fiftieth anniversary and the prospect of a group reunion:

Asked if he’s looking forward to the anniversary, he responds, “Not particularly,” adding, “I don’t really like working with the guys, but it all depends on how we feel and how much money’s involved. Money’s not the only reason I made rec­ords, but it does hold a place in our lives.“

Beach Boys Plan Anniversary Blowout With Likely Reunion Tour (Rolling Stone)

Brian Wilson, December 2011, on the Beach Boys’ fiftieth anniversary and the prospect of a group reunion:

“This anniversary is special to me because I miss the boys and it will be a thrill for me to make a new record and be on stage with them again.”

Surviving Beach Boys Announce Album, Tour Plans (Billboard)

[I like George Harrison’s 1989 comment on the idea of a Beatles reunion: “As far as I’m concerned, there won’t be a Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead.”]

Stubbs’s Corollary

The principle of eternal reruns:

Time is infinite. Television is not. Thus there are reruns.

This principle (which I just invented) is a corollary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s principle of eternal return. I call it Stubbs’s Corollary, after Freddy “Rerun” Stubbs of What’s Happening!!

[The words “what’s happening” themselves nicely capture the idea of eternal return. I invented Stubbs’s Corollary after thinking about Me-TV, which is nothing but reruns. Time for each of us is finite: don’t spend too much of it in front of a television.]

Strunk and White rap

“Jails and schools should not be called facilities. / I hate all these writers with second-rate abilities.” Rapping The Elements of Style, with “Strunk,” “White,” and Olde English “800.”

Related reading
All Strunk and White posts

[The Olde English is a nice touch.]