Sales associates (Route 66)

You never know who will show up in an episode Route 66. Here are Bibi Osterwald, Soupy Sales, and Dawn Nickerson, in one of the show’s loopiest episodes, “This Is Going to Hurt Me More Than It Hurts You” (aired February 14, 1964). If you scroll the screen really fast, you will feel that Soupy Sales is turning his head to look at you, just as he did in 1964.

I know Bibi Osterwald best as Boothy in The World of Henry Orient (1964). I know Soupy Sales as a funny, funny figure from local children’s television when I was a boy. Think of him as the anti-Fred (Rogers, that is). (Here’s a complete show from 1965, in three parts.) Dawn Nickerson has disappeared from film and television, but she appears to be on Facebook.

Oh, and it wouldn’t be a Sales effort without pies.


[Sales and Martin Milner.]

Elaine and I watched all 116 episodes of Route 66 this spring and summer, starting in April and ending in July. What a great television series: terrific writing, terrific acting, terrific cinematography, an amazing array of guest stars, and locations, locations, locations. Naked City is the only other show in its class.

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Albert Murray (1916–2013)

From The New York Times: “Albert Murray, an essayist, critic and novelist who influenced the national discussion about race by challenging black separatism, insisting that the black experience was essential to American culture and inextricably tied to it, died on Sunday at his home in Harlem.”

From Murray’s The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (1970):

when the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is for fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest, and the medicine man. He is making an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response to that which André Malraux describes as la condition humane. Extemporizing in response to the exigencies of the situation in which he finds himself, he is confronting, acknowledging, and contending with the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence by playing with the possibilities that are also there. Thus does man the player become man the stylizer and by the same token the humanizer of chaos; and thus does play become ritual, ceremony, and art; and thus also does the dance-beat improvisation of experience in the blues idiom become survival technique, esthetic equipment for living, and a central element in the dynamics of U. S. Negro life style.

The New Yorker has unlocked (for how long?) a 1996 profile of Murray by Henry Louis Gates Jr.: “King of Cats.”

[I have to say it: I have little use for the Albert Murray-Stanley Crouch-Wynton Marsalis idea of jazz, promulgated by means of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz. There: I said it.]

Sketching suspects

“The last thing I want in a room when I have a trauma victim is a machine.” In the New York City Police Department, the Artist Unit still sketches suspects by hand: Fighting Crime With Pencil and Paper (The New York Times).

Faber-Castell Type Cleaner

A second box has a large price sticker with the code 11983: January 1983? November 9, 1983? I bought both boxes, at a much later date, from an office-supply store that was surrendering, finally, to time’s slow-chapt power. I had no need for Faber-Castell Type Cleaner: I just wanted to give these items a home.

The packaging design seen here — Helvetica type, a black-and-white photograph, a colored flap — was once found on a range of Faber-Castell products. I have a box of Mongol pencils with brown flaps. Blackwing Pages has photographs of similar boxes for Blackwing pencils, light blue flaps and then brown. I don’t know what other products wore green.

Looking at the photograph on this package leaves me convinced of something that I’ve suspected ever since getting an iPhone: that the jumping-up keys on the iPhone’s keyboard are more than practical, visual feedback. I think that they’re yet another bit of skeuomorphic design, meant to suggest the movement of a typewriter’s typebars. I have no evidence, but it’d be difficult to persuade me otherwise.

[This post is the fourteenth in an occasional series, “From the Museum of Supplies.” Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items. The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real.]

Other Museum of Supplies exhibits
Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27 : Eagle Turquoise display case : Eagle Verithin display case : Fineline erasers : Illinois Central Railroad Pencil : A Mad Men sort of man, sort of : Mongol No. 2 3/8 : Moore Metalhed Tacks : National’s “Fuse-Tex” Skytint : Pedigree Pencil : Real Thin Leads : Rite-Rite Long Leads : Stanley carpenter’s rule

Domestic comedy

Watching The Food Network:

“Why is peperoni spelled with only one p?”

“Maybe it is.”

[Simultaneously reach for iPhones.]

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Fran Lebowitz on Mayor Bloomberg

The New York Times asked prominent New Yorkers to evaluate the Bloomberg years. From Fran Lebowitz’s evaluation:

One of the worst things about Michael Bloomberg being the mayor is that because he was so rich, he didn’t have to appeal to what he kept calling the “special interest groups” — which, you know, I would call the “citizens.”

I don’t think public school teachers are a special interest group; I don’t think cops are a special interest group; I don’t think tenants are a special interest group. Billionaires are a special interest group. So when he says that anyone who is running for mayor is going to have to make concessions to these special interest groups — that is what democracy is. Not issuing bans and demands.

[Watch the Times video clip, which differs from the printed matter below it. It surprises me that only two of the eight interviewees mention or allude to stop-and-frisk.]

Todd McLellan, taking things apart

Todd McLellan, disassembler of objects, has a book of his work: Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living. Here from his website is the page devoted to disassembled objects. The accordion is especially breathtaking, or mindblowing.

[I noticed McLellan’s Old Typewriter some time ago.]

How to salute a professor

[Genuine, unretouched Google search that brought a seeker to Orange Crate Art.]

I can think of three explanations for wanting to know how to salute a professor in an e-mail:

1. The searcher is a student at a military academy.

2. The searcher has English as a second language.

3. The searcher, intent on observing all formalities, is thinking in terms of salutation, a term better reserved for dowdy old letter-writing.

I am glad though to see someone asking the question rather than beginning with Hey, or with nothing at all: I am a student in your class, &c. Good titles for poems there: “Poem Beginning with Hey,” “Poem Beginning with Nothing at All.”

Everything this searcher seeks can be found in this world-famous Orange Crate Art post: How to e-mail a professor. Am I tooting my own horn? I guess. Toot. Toot. I am tooting softly, with a Harmon mute.

The word salute reminds me of a startling essay-starter that Claire Hahn of Fordham University shared with our class one day: “Chaucer stood with one foot firmly planted in the Middle Ages, and with the other he saluted the dawn of the Renaissance.” She loved it.

Which in turn reminds me of something my friend Rob Zseleczky was fond of recalling: someone asking him a professor at a party, “Milton: didn’t he write Chaucer?”

But my favorite use of the word salute is this one:

[I’ve corrected the anecdote, as per Luanne Koper’s memory: it was Rob’s story, but the question was asked of a professor.]

A teaching thought

From an interview with novelist John Williams, who is speaking of William Stoner, the professor protagonist of Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner:

The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner’s sense of a job. Teaching to him is a job — a job in the good and honorable sense of the word. . . . [I]t’s the love of the thing that’s essential. And if you love something, you’re going to understand it. And if you understand it, you’re going to learn a lot. It all grows out of the love of the thing. The lack of that love defines a bad teacher. And there are a lot of bad teachers.

Stoner is yet another New York Review Books reprint of my acquaintance. More than that: it’s a beautifully written, beautifully felt novel. Every element in its plot seems inevitable, yet everything in the novel is a surprise. I recommend Stoner with great enthusiasm.

In May, NPR reported that Stoner was then a bestseller through much of Europe.

[Bryan Woolley’s “An Interview with John Williams” appeared in the Denver Quarterly 20.3 (1985–86). A portion of the interview is quoted with mistakes in the introduction to the 2003 NYRB volume. I’ve gone back to the source.]

Stevie Staple-Freak

You can use the idea of “youth culture,” or your vague understanding of that idea, to sell most anything. Witness this 1969 advertisement: “Get high on honey.” And witness the advertisement to the left, in which Stevie Staple-Freak helps the next president. If Stevie weren’t grooving on presidential candidates, his long hair, plaid bells, and two-tone shoes would be sufficient to mark him as a cool guy. He could have gone to high school with Greg Brady.

I wrote youth culture, not counter-culture : Stevie is working within the system, defeating a “radical anarchist” and bringing order from chaos with his Swingline Tot stapler. And yet he’s a freak. And the narrative line here is itself freaky, loopy, wobbly, comix-like. In what television studio do past presidents become future presidents? In what time-frame do Washington and Lincoln debate? And in what material world can one staple the blades of a fan to a hat? It feels like a bad trip to me — not that I would really know.

This ad appeared in the October 1972 Boys’s Life. Click (the ad, not the magazine) for a larger view. And here, if you like, is a Swingline Tot looking just like the one in the ad.

The artist responsible for these illustrations has since moved in other directions. You can read about Nicholas Zann at his website.

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