Caution: If you’ve never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, you may want to skip this post.
Behold Nancy Ritz and Sluggo Smith, in their screen tests for the roles of Madeleine Elster and John “Scottie” Ferguson, roles that went to Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart. Nancy’s Madeleine, possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes, is about to speak the haunting line “Somewhere in here I was born, and there I died.”
[Click for a larger view of Novak, Stewart, and a cross-section of a redwood.]
More haunting still is the Ritz and Smith version of Vertigo’s recognition scene. In the blue-green light of the Hotel Empire’s neon sign, Scottie sees Judy Barton transformed at last into the now-dead Madeleine.
Vertigo is my favorite film. I think it can take a joke.
[Click for larger views.]
Other Nancy posts
Charlotte russe
The greatest Nancy panel?
Nancy is here
Nancy meets Stanley Kubrick (screen test for The Shining)
[Nancy panels by Ernie Bushmiller, March 13 and March 30, 1945, from Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943–1945 (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012). I’ve removed speech balloons from the second panel. Blue-green light courtesy of the Hotel Empire.]
Monday, July 2, 2012
Nancy meets Alfred Hitchcock
Friday, June 29, 2012
Ice-cream cones
But look: the inside cone too is melting. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
The temperature here in east-central Illinois: 102 °F. The heat index: 115 °F.
Related reading
Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” (Poets.org)
Neatening up
[Before and after.]
What I’m about to suggest might be common knowledge, but perhaps not. The paint-can tool in an image editor offers an easy way to neaten up a scan from Google Books (or from anywhere). Choose a color (perhaps with an eyedropper tool) and pour. Digital artifacts, begone.
The image above is from Google Books, an illustration of the Robinson Reminder pocket notebook. I used the paint-can tool in a more elaborate way last week after scanning a page from Hart’s Guide to New York City. When I pressed hard to get the text on a verso page, chunks of the text from the recto page came through. So I aimed and poured, and poured again and again.
[I like Seashore, a free image-editor for OS X.]
Quick 50 Writing Tools
From Roy Peter Clark and The Poynter Institute: Quick 50 Writing Tools, a bare-bones presentation of the content of Clark’s book Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (2008).
Some of the advice in this PDF (“Limit self-criticism in early drafts”) might be helpful as is. Some (“Climb up and down the ladder of abstraction”) might remain cryptic without further explanation. But like they say, it’s a start. And there is, after all, a book.
[“Like they say”: for me this phrase always recalls the poet Robert Creeley. You can find it three times for instance in this Paris Review interview.]
NYPL, a series of tubes
The New York Public Library is a series of tubes, sort of (via Pete Lit).
Related reading
Series of tubes (Wikipedia)
Mac keyboard shortcuts
From Apple: a page with a gazillion keyboard shortcuts for OS X. A wonderful thing about the Mac is that you can get along very well with just a handful of these. But for those who want more, there are more.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Chrome for iOS
Google’s Chrome browser is now available for iOS. On my first-generation iPad, Chrome is fast, very fast. The browser is minimalist in design, which is good, and minimalist in options, which is not so good. There is, for instance, no way to remove the microphone icon from the address-and-search bar (the first-generation iPad has no microphone). And there is, of course, no way to add an ad-blocking extension or any other extension.
My iOS browser of choice is iCab Mobile, which blocks ads (if you so choose) with filters. Browsing is slower than with Chrome, but having fewer distractions means a lot to me when I’m reading online. For now, I’m sticking with iCab Mobile.
Given Apple-Google hostilities, I have to wonder: is listing Chrome under Utilities someone’s idea of a joke?
[Re: “Address-and-search bar”: I can’t bring myself to use the Google term omnibox.]
Robinson Reminders in print
[New Yorker, March 18, 1944.]
“Jot it down — Do it — Tear it out — Live notes only!” It’s like Getting Things Done with perforations. Note the clever names for the other products: Billminders and Miss Gadabout. Miss Gadabout!
Google Books has dingy-looking scans of Robinson Reminder advertisements from as early as 1915. The slogan — “Live notes only,” minus the exclamation point — was already in place. That slogan does seem to go with early-twentieth-century notions of efficiency. Clear the decks: history is bunk, right?
Here, from 1921, sharpened, straightened, and neatened up, is the patent for the Robinson Reminder:
If you cannot get enough of the Robinson Reminder, A Continuous Lean has a post with some fine photographs.
Previously on Orange Crate Art
Pocket notebook sighting (a Robinson Reminder in the movies)
Refrigerator inventory
A soon-to-be-published book on material culture and American households suggests a possible correlation between the number of magnets on a refrigerator and the amount of stuff in a household.
I of course had to inventory the two available surfaces of our refrigerator. The results:
What’s startling: this number correlates exactly with the amount of stuff in our household.
Taking a refrigerator inventory might be more difficult than it would seem: so many items remain invisible, even when you’re looking right at them, or at least when I am.
