Route 66, very, very meta

The final episode of the television series Naked City ran on May 29, 1963. On October 18, 1963, Harry Bellaver (who played Detective Frank Arcaro) and Horace McMahon (Lieutenant Michael “Mike” Parker) appeared in an episode of Route 66, “Where Are the Sounds of Celli Brahms?” It was the first post-City television appearance for each actor. Bellaver plays Shagbag, the publicity man for the Minneapolis Aquatennial. McMahon plays Fenton, the head of an acoustical engineering firm. What makes it all meta: Stirling Silliphant, creator of Naked City, was a co-creator (with Herbert B. Leonard) of Route 66.


[Harry Bellaver as Shagbag.]


[Horace McMahon as Fenton. Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) accidentally stepped on Fenton’s sunglasses. You may wonder if the word accidentally is needed in that sentence. Yes, it is, as Route 66 abounds in acts of male aggression.]

What makes it all very, very meta is this exchange between Shagbag and Tod’s traveling partner Lincoln Case (Glenn Corbett):

“Twenty-two years I’ve been doing this festival every summer. So I’m kind of greeted out, smiled out, and backslapped out, you know? There’s another thing: I never wanted to be a publicity man. I always wanted to be a cop.”

“You look like a cop. I keep thinking I’ve seen you somewhere before — as a cop, I mean. New York maybe?”

“Nope. Never left Minnesota.”

“Where Are the Sounds of Celli Brahms?” is one of the zanier Route 66 episodes. It’s no stretch for Bellaver and McMahon, as Naked City abounds in moments of arch comedy.

Related reading, via Pinboard
All Naked City posts
All Route 66 posts

[Attention, Daughter Number Three: you can get many good glimpses of Minneapolis in this episode. Notice the library behind Horace McMahon.]

Recently updated

“Warnings from the Trenches” A teacher decides to return to the classroom.

Texting and driving

I tend not to link to what readers can find (or may have already found) at many other sites. Here’s an exception: Werner Herzog’s short film From One Second to the Next (YouTube).

Living and working in a college town, I often see young adults texting while driving. I see older drivers texting too. Their vehicles tend to drift, rudderless, and it’s obvious that their attention is elsewhere.

Don’t text while you’re driving. Watch the documentary and take the pledge.

In search of lost mail

The other night I lamented to Elaine how long it’s been since I visited the post office. I think I was last there in May. Our post office has no great charm: it occupies a small, newish, nondescript building on the edge of town. A classic-rock station plays in the tiny service area. But still: I like going to the post office. Doing so makes me feel that I’m Getting Things, or at least a thing, Done.

Thus I’ve never understood commercials touting the joys of DIY postage. ”I don’t leave the shop anymore,” one satisfied customer says. It’s nice leave the shop and be engaged with the world (and while you’re at it, help keep a postal clerk or two in a job). Even Langley Collyer left the shop, so to speak, going out at night for food and water.

Years ago, when I was working on my dissertation in Brookline, Massachusetts, it was a great pleasure to leave the shop, so to speak, for a midday walk to Coolidge Corner: the photocopy place, the stationery store, and, often, the post office. I would buy some stamps, or mail a letter. But now we’re full up on stamps, for a long time if not Forever, and no one writes letters. Letters, anyone?

On e-reading

Nicholas Carr:

E-books are still taking share from printed books, sales of which declined by 4.7 percent in the quarter, but the anemic growth of the electronic market calls into question the strength of the so-called “digital revolution” in the book business.

The flattening of e-book sales (Rough Type)

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Reading is inherently ephemeral, but it feels less so when you’re making your way through a physical book, which persists when you’ve finished it. It is a monument to the activity of reading. It makes this imaginary activity entirely substantial. But the quiddity of e-reading is that it effaces itself.

Books to Have and to Hold (The New York Times)

[Thanks to Elaine for the first and to Matt Thomas’s Submitted for Your Perusal for the second.]

Eydie Gormé (1928-2013)

[Eydie Gormé and Steve Lawrence with an autograph-seeker. Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Eydie Gormé and Steve Lawrence (or Steve and Eydie) were a staple of television in my youth. There they were, co-hosting The Mike Douglas Show. There they were, on yet another variety hour. They offered the kind of entertainment that people like me dismissed as hopelessly square. How intolerant, how smug, and how mistaken.

The New York Times has an obituary.

A YouTube sampler
“Blame It on the Bossa Nova”
“I Wanna Be Around”
“The Man I l Love”
“I Want to Stay Here” (with Steve Lawrence)
“Sabor a mí” (with Los Panchos)
A Sinatra medley (with Steve Lawrence and Frank Sinatra)
What’s My Line? (Gormé is the mystery guest; Lawrence is a panelist)

If you choose one to listen to, I’d suggest “I Wanna Be Around.”

[Gorme? Gormé? On What’s My Line? she signs with an accent.]

積ん読 [tsundoku]

Today’s Oscar’s Day made me think of a Japanese word I’ve had in my head for a while: 積ん読 [tsundoku]: “the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with such other unread books.”

Here is an illustrated definition with wide circulation. I wish I knew how to give proper credit to the artist, known to the general public only as the daughter of a Reddit user named Wemedge.

Blackwing goes to Hollywood

In The Hollywood Reporter, Seth Abramovitch looks at the Blackwing pencil’s place in the entertainment industry and asks, Why Is Hollywood Obsessed with This Pencil? Abramovitch calls the Blackwing “one of the industry’s most valuable — and quickly disappearing — possessions.”

For anyone who wants to learn more about the Blackwing pencil, Blackwing Pages, cited in the article, is the place to go. You might start with this post: No Ordinary Pencil: A Portrait of the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602.

Related reading
All OCA Blackwing posts (Pinboard)

Overheard

“I said, ‘Oh, look at the cheeseballs,’ not ‘Grab the cheeseballs.’”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[All dialogue guaranteed overheard.]

47 Federal Street

It’s still there:

The building, looking out over Springfield from the heights of Federal Street, has all the appearance of exactly what it is — an institution for the preservation and diffusion of learning. A fine, simple, gracious, Georgian brick structure, it stands like some university hall or library, surrounded by broad, clipped lawns and shaded by overarching elms. Its very street-number is significant; when the city officials approved plans for the building, they notified the Merriam Company that it might select any odd figure between 31 and 49. The Company chose “47” in allusion to the year 1847, date of publication of the first Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Robert Keith Leavitt, Noah’s Ark, New England Yankees, and the Endless Quest: A Short History of the Original Webster Dictionaries, with Particular Reference to Their First Hundred Years (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1947).

[The book, borrowed from the library, is the source of the image. The book’s circulation slip begins in 1949. Thanks, library.]