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Crocodile Now with an identification of the mysterious object above.

Museum of Endangered Sounds

Just a block or two away from the Library of Vanished Sounds, so to speak: it’s the Museum of Endangered Sounds.

Thanks to Music Clip of the Day for sending the link to the MES my way.

[One sound conspicuously absent from the MES: dial-up.]

Molly Dodd, Mongol user

[Blair Brown as Molly Dodd, Mongol pencil user. From “Here’s some ducks all in a row,” The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, June 17, 1989. Click for a larger view.]

Some generous soul has made all five seasons of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd available on YouTube. Elaine and I are doing our bit by watching. Notice that even in a videotaped-from-TV blur, the Mongol’s ferrule is immediately recognizable.

Whys isn’t this series available on DVD? The cost of licensing music rights appears to be a problem. Why is the cost of licensing music rights a problem? Because Molly does a lot of singing. In the scene above, she’s singing Edward Redding’s “The End of a Love Affair.” But someday this series will be released on DVD. I just know it. Like Molly, I’m an optimist.

The Mongol (now defunct in the United States) is my favorite pencil. Here’s some proof.

The kids are all right

Rachel Leddy and Ben Leddy put together Adele’s “Someone Like You” and Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”: “Someone Like Somebody That I Used To Know.”

The dinner hour

The Browns were having left-over meat loaf for dinner one night when the telephone rang.

“It must be important,” said Mrs. Brown worriedly. “Otherwise why would anyone call during the dinner hour?”

Donald J. Sobol, Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1963).

Was the world ever this dowdy? I believe it was. Mrs. Brown is right too — it’s Officer Carlson on the line, with the news that the Princess Bake Shop on Vine Street has been robbed. Hurry, Chief Brown. And drink your milk, Encyclopedia, so that you can go with Dad and solve the crime.

When was the dinner hour? That question (which Google cannot answer) might fuel an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, preferably in the context of an argument at, yes, a dinner table. I will suggest that the dinner hour or dinner “hour” ran from 5:00 to 7:00, Monday through Friday. In some households, it still does.

Yes, I’m reading Encyclopedia Brown books. Donald Sobol died last week.

A related post
Dinner

Henry and a gum machine

[Henry, July 18, 2012.]

Henrietta has just wondered what Henry would look like with a mustache. The mysterious streetside object last seen on July 19, 2011 is here revealed as a gum machine, complete with mirror.

I have never seen these gum machines outside the subway stations of my childhood. But then I have never lived in the comics.

Other Henry posts
Betty Boop with Henry
Henry, an anachronism
Henry buys liverwurst
Henry, getting things done
Henry’s repeated gesture

Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland

Harvey Pekar and Joseph Remnant. Cleveland. Introduction by Alan Moore. Scarsdale, NY, and Marietta, GA: Zip Comics and Top Shelf Productions, 2012. 128 pages. $21.99 (hardcover), $9.99 (digital).

                                The Best Location in the Nation.
                                Metropolis of the Western Reserve.
                                The Mistake on the Lake.

                                Three nicknames for Cleveland, Ohio

“From off the streets of Cleveland”: Harvey Pekar (1939–2010) is a writer whose work is stamped with the name of a city. There is nothing glamorous or sinister about Pekar’s Cleveland; it is not Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. Nor is there anything mythic about the Cleveland landscape; it is not the Paterson of William Carlos Williams’s epic poem. But to borrow a phrase from Williams: Cleveland is “the local conditions,” the city of Pekar’s birth, a place in which to work, worry, and observe.


[Click for a larger view.]

Cleveland is two books really: a brief history of a city and the story of Pekar’s life there, through three marriages and thirty-odd years in a “flunky job” as a file clerk in a Veterans Affairs hospital. Pekar’s story of the city begins and ends on notes of hope: the Cleveland Indians’ 1948 World Series win over the Boston Braves (the Indians’ second and last Series win to date) and the development of a medical mart and convention center (scheduled to open in 2013). But the story of twentieth-century Cleveland is largely a story of decline, with years of industrial might (iron and steel, manufacturing, railroads) followed by unemployment, poverty, crime, and suburban flight. This story, alas, has become a quintessential American story, told again and again in empty storefronts and abandoned properties.

Pekar enters the story in 1939. He recounts a relatively pleasant childhood and adolescence: a far less violent picture of his early years than the one he gives in The Quitter (2005). Here we see young Harvey playing baseball, mastering public transit, discovering the joys of used-book stores, and savoring the “frosty malt” at Higbee’s (a locally-owned department store, now gone). In adulthood, Pekar finds security in a Civil Service job (one requiring little or no intellectual effort, which he reserves for his reading and writing). Pekar regulars Mr. Boats and Toby Radloff appear in scenes at work. Pekar’s first two marriages fail (he is less than generous in his depiction of his partners), but a third marriage, to Joyce Brabner, sticks. And thus the world familiar to readers of American Splendor comes into view. Chronology and continuity are sometimes off, as when Pekar recounts his second wife’s life after marriage and asks, one page later, “What happened to her?” before beginning to tell the story again. At other times, digressions are masterful, as when Pekar’s account of his daily routine makes room for commentaries on Cleveland radio personality Diane Rehm and bookseller John T. Zubal.

Pekar’s world comes into view through the labor of Joseph Remnant, who has become one of my favorite illustrators of Pekar’s stories. His style is reminiscent of Robert Crumb’s, with considerable crosshatching and much loving attention to the sometimes invisible clutter of city streets (chimney pipes, streetlights, telephone poles). For those who know Cleveland well, panel after panel will evoke familiar elements of the city: the Arcade, the Detroit-Superior Bridge, the Public Library, the Terminal Tower. The research that went into Remnant’s work must have been considerable. Here is one detail that for this non-Clevelander was decisive, a panel from Pekar’s account of the life of John T. Zubal:



I don’t know Cleveland, but I know the Bronx, and I know Fordham. Behind John and Marilyn stands the clocktower of Keating Hall, the centerpiece of Fordham’s Bronx campus. That Remnant would take the time to include this detail, one that just a handful of readers might recognize, says much about his approach to making art.

Remnant’s work also delights me in that it gets Harvey Pekar right — not that there is one proper way to draw him, but that there are many ways to go wrong. Remnant’s Pekar is cranky but not crazed, frayed but not frazzled. He wanders the streets of Cleveland in this volume at all ages and in all moods, bent forward in his later years, a man for all seasons and just one city.

What I find most moving in this book in Pekar’s idea of a good city: concerts, libraries, museums, parks, bookstores, and record stores. That’s very much my idea of a good city, and it’s an idea that grows more fragile by the day.

[Harvey Pekar by Joseph Remnant. From the title page.]

Thanks to the publishers for a review copy of the book.

Related reading
Cleveland (Top Shelf Productions)
All Harvey Pekar posts (via Pinboard)

More Pekar and Remnant collaborations
“Autodidact” : “Back in the Day” : “Legendary Vienna” : “Muncie, Indiana” : “Reciprocity” : “Sweeping Problem”

Sydney Smith on tea and coffee

[Sydney Smith, Wit and Wisdom of the Rev. Sydney Smith, Being Selections from His Writing and Passages of His Letters and Table-Talk (New York: Redfield, 1858).]

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) was an Anglican cleric and, it would seem, delightful company. He created a rhyming recipe for salad dressing. He argued against slavery and for the education of women. One more point in his favor: in profile he strongly resembles the late Bill Youngren. You’ll have to take my word for it.

Donald J. Sobol (1924–2012)

Donald J. Sobol, the creator of Encyclopedia Brown, has died at the age of eighty-seven.

I caught on to the Encyclopedia Brown books in 2008. They’re wonderful. I’m not sure how I managed not to figure that out earlier.

Here’s a post that reproduces an illustration from the first Brown book, Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective (1963). Notice the orange crate.

Nancy meets Billy Wilder

From Nancy Ritz’s 1945 screen test for The Seven Year Itch (dir. Billy Wilder, 1955). In an orderly universe, the title would read The Seven-Year Itch and Marilyn Monroe would have had no competition for the role of The Girl.

Other Nancy posts
Charlotte russe
The greatest Nancy panel?
Nancy is here
Nancy meets Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo)
Nancy meets Stanley Kubrick (The Shining)

[Nancy panel by Ernie Bushmiller, February 12, 1945, from Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943–1945 (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012).]