New York 19

Postal zone numbers for large American cities were first used in 1943. ZIP Codes were first used in July 1963. This broken label is affixed to a mail chute in the stairwell of 724 Fifth Avenue, New York 19, N.Y., the home of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

Other postal posts
Letter box and lock
A mail box in Naked City
A mail chute In Molly Dodd’s building
Mail chutes and phone booths
Snail Mail


[Life, November 9, 1959.]

Route 66 status check

Tod: “How’s my status now?”

Buz: “Quo, man, quo.”

From the Route 66 episode “Fly Away Home: Part Two,” February 17, 1961.

Things I learned on my summer vacation (2013)

People in cars with suspension problems look like bobbleheads. Really.

*

If you are faced with an endless tie-up on I-70 in Ohio, exit the highway and find U.S. 40, the old National Road, which runs parallel to 70. Works in Indiana too.

*

If, once on U.S. 40, you stop for gas at the BP station in Springfield, Ohio, and you need to use the facilities, just walk over to the Fazoli’s next door. They send people over there all the time.

*

Desktop Diaries is a wonderful part of the radio show Science Friday, heard on many NPR stations. (But not on mine.)

*

The work of cracking Linear B involved cigarette cartons, library slips, and stray bits of paper.

*

Snobs are always in some way clueless, and their snobbery blinds them to their cluelessness: “I, clueless?”

*

“CUOMO BEATS WEINER . . . and then goes limp”: a headline from the New York Post.

*

New Zealand prohibits certain names for newborns. Among them: Lucifer, Mafia No Fear, and Messiah, each of which has been proposed by at least one proud New Zealand parent in the past.

*

“I thought you meant breakfast bar.”

“No, I meant breakfast bar.”

*

Nora Guthrie’s 1967 recording “Home Before Dark” is a strange and beautiful piece of pop music. Yes, Woody and Marjorie’s daughter.

*

In the towns outside Boston, where streets and highways were never meant to accommodate the number of vehicles they now carry, traffic is worse than ever. It is dispiriting to see so many people driving into Boston on a workday morning. I imagine the earth, in protest, holding all these vehicles’ wheels, as in the Mahabharata.

*

The Glass Flowers Gallery in the Harvard Museum of Natural History is a wonder to behold.

*

A father to a child in the HMNH: “You don’t need anything. You have a houseful of stuff.”

*

In the Glass Flowers Gallery, a boy on a school trip: “Look at this! Look at this! Look at this! Look at this! It’s beautiful!”

*

Anyone puzzled by the Museum of Jurassic Technology could do worse than spend an hour or two in the HMNH. The information cards, some quite old, offer excellent examples of Proto-Museumese, the MJT’s native language.


[“Cultivated at the Botanic Garden of Glasgow, from seeds obtained by Mr. Tweedie in Tacuman, about 1830.”]

*

Cardullo’s still stands in Harvard Square, and the tea is still where it was thirty or so years ago.

*

Follow the Honey must be the best-smelling store in Cambridge. Friendly too, with unusual choices in music: Tommy James and the Shondells, Leadbelly. Honey seems as various as coffee, tea, or wine.

*

That the site of the Boston Marathon bombing shows no trace of destruction does nothing to belie what happened.

*

A mother duck and her young can manage to cross the Massachusetts Turnpike unharmed. Traffic was light, and drivers were attentive. Make way for ducklings!

*

In Chelsea Market, the Manhattan Fruit Exchange has a fine salad bar. Cheapest meal we had.

*

In Fort Lee, New Jersey, Bibby’s Mediterranean Café serves excellent food. I think of this restaurant as the North Jersey equivalent of Pittsburgh’s Leena’s Food — inexpensive, tiny, unpretentious, and great. A falafel throwdown seems in order.

*

Things I never imagined seeing: Federico García Lorca’s guitar, in the New York Public Library. Frank O’Hara letters and manucripts, in Tibor de Nagy’s exhibition Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets.

*

Lorca, in a letter: “New York me parece horrible pero por eso mismo me voy allí.” My translation: “New York seems horrible but that’s why I’m going.”

*

Step into a gallery, a museum, a store, and “the city” (that is, New York) seems to disappear. You have stepped away from the city.

*

Stand under a store awning, out of the rain, chat with others similarly stuck, and you become part of the city’s day.

*

Seymour Barab’s No Laughing Matter is a one-act opera for children to perform. A synopsis, from the composer’s website: “A king takes a young bride whose natural ebullience is suppressed by the dour Council of Ministers in the name of preserving dignity in the kingdom. When the tables are turned, rejoicing prevails.” We saw a lovely performance by fourth- and fifth-graders of the Philosophy Day School. Great kids. I’m sorry that their school — which seems by any standard extraordinary — is closing.

*

Margie King Barab can sing in Hungarian, beautifully. Something magical happens when, in the course of everyday life, a real singer begins to sing.

*

The Forbes Galleries (62 Fifth Avenue at Twelfth Street) are worth stopping for. Through August 3, the galleries are devoted to the work of artist and cartoonist Ronald Searle.

*

It is possible to live in the television series Naked City, sort of. I was amazed to learn that Jack Lee, the musical contractor for the series, played piano for the first performance of Seymour’s opera Little Red Riding Hood. In the West Village, Elaine and I went to West Fourth Street and visited the Music Inn, which turns up in one of our favorite Naked City episodes. I showed the owner his store’s television appearance. Later Elaine and I sat down in the Coffee Foundry at 186 West Fourth, the address that housed Bianchi & Margherita, another Naked City bit player. Biggest delight: 3 Sheridan Square, where Nancy Malone’s character Libby Kingston lives, is right off West Fourth Street. Who knew? Not us.

*

The NJ Transit worker I met years ago at Gate 212 in the Port Authority is still on the job, and he still — it’s obvious — loves his work. He keeps everyone posted on which bus is going where, and he can spot and help an out-of-towner (like me) at a glance. I hope he had a good Memorial Day weekend.

*

It feels so good to sit down on a bus after walking back to the Port Authority. (But I knew that already.)

Elaine has two three posts about our adventures: Lorca’s Guitar, No Laughing Matter, “No one looks at a flower, really. One hasn’t time.”

More things I learned on my summer vacation
2012 : 2011 : 2010 : 2009 : 2008 : 2007 : 2006

[Summer: the time between the spring and fall semesters, regardless of season.]

Memorial Day, 1913

[“Police Head Dies in Newark Parade: Chief Corbitt Collapses in His Saddle as Procession Is About to Start. Gave Up Auto for a Horse. ‘It May Be My Last Memorial Day Parade,’ Civil War Veteran Told His Associates.” New York Times, May 31, 1913.]

Such short distances: Michael Corbitt’s great-grandchildren — or even grandchildren — could be reading this post. My grandparents could have watched this parade.

Detropia on PBS

Tomorrow night on PBS’s Independent Lens, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's 2012 documentary Detropia. Check, as they say, your local listings.

I saw Detropia earlier this year and wrote about it in this post.

Commencement addresses

Re: the previous post: if you graduated from college and showed up for commencement, do you remember anything the commencement speaker said?

Alan Alda spoke at my commencement (Fordham College ’78). I remember one thing from his speech: he asked those graduating to ask themselves, every so often, this question: “What are my values?” Sounds trite, I know, but it works, or at least it’s worked for me.

If you remember something, anything, of what you heard at your commencement, fire away in the comments, please. Let the wisdom, or whatever, accumulate.

[Commencement : what a weird word. Alda is Fordham College ’56.]

“An eccentric, if not a subversive”

A wise observation from Bill Watterson, from a 1990 commencement address:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.

[Found via Armand Frasco’s notebookism.]

Michiko Kakutani, messy watch

New York Times book-reviewer Michiko Kakutani is known for her frequent (some might say too frequent) use of the verb limn. Far more frequent is her use of the adjective messy. In February 2011 I wrote a post that tracked Kakutani’s use of messy from 1979 to 2010, from drizzle to steady rain to downpour and back to drizzle. The word appeared just once in 2011 and once more in 2012. The year 2012 also brought a conspicuously inappropriate use of the verb mess up. And now messy is back. From a review of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names:

Once she is a teenager, she quickly adopts the habits of friends from school, even if she doesn’t exactly care for them — listening to Rihanna, trying on armfuls of clothing at the mall (and leaving them in huge messy piles in the dressing room) and watching pornography online.

Here messy seems to function like a tic: given the context, is there really a difference between piles of clothes and messy piles of clothes? If one leave clothes in huge piles, is neatness ever involved?

[Since 2011 and 2012 brought one messy each, it’s reasonable to speculate that this review might offer the only 2013 sighting.]

Ruskin takes flight

Just eight sentences, just one paragraph. Pick your favorite phrases:

The charts of the world which have been drawn up by modern science have thrown into a narrow space the expression of a vast amount of knowledge, but I have never yet seen any one pictorial enough to enable the spectator to imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which exists between Northern and Southern countries. We know the differences in detail, but we have not that broad glance and grasp which would enable us to to feel them in their fulness. We know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world’s surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference between the district of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us, for a moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediterannean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun: here and there an angry spot of thunder, a grey stain of storm, moving upon the burning field; and here and there a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes; but for the most part a great peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop nearer to them, with bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among masses of laurel, and orange, and plumy palm, that abate with their grey-green shadows the burning of the marble rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping under lucent sand. Then let us pass farther towards the north, until we see the orient colours change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the Volga, seen through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud and flaky veils of the mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands: and then, farther north still, to see the earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm, and chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. And, having once traversed in thought this gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in the belt of animal life; the multitudes of swift and brilliant creatures that glance in the air and sea, or tread the sands of the southern zone; striped zebras and spotted leopards, glistening serpents, and birds arrayed in purple and scarlet. Let us contrast their delicacy and brilliancy of colour, and swiftness of motion, with the frost-cramped strength, and shaggy covering, and dusky plumage of the northern tribes; contrast the Arabian horse with the Shetland, the tiger and leopard with the wolf and bear, the antelope with the elk, the bird of paradise with the osprey; and then, submissively acknowledging the great laws by which the earth and all that it bears are ruled throughout their being, let us not condemn, but rejoice in the expression by man of his own rest in the statutes of the lands that gave him birth. Let us watch him with reverence as he sets side by side the burning gems, and smooths with soft sculpture the jaspar pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into a cloudless sky: but not with less reverence let us stand by him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creatures of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them.

John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” The Stones of Venice, Volume II (1853).

This is your brain on tea

[Life, February 12, 1940.]

The schedule appears in an advertisement promoting not a brand of tea but tea itself, the work no doubt of the Tea Board or Tea Council or Tea House or some such industry group.

Related reading
All tea posts (Pinboard)