In-house shoeshines

“Inside New York’s investment houses, a vestige of old Wall Street lives on”: Shoeshines Keep Wall Street in the Black (or Maybe Brown) (The New York Times).

The law firm where I proofread in my student days had an in-house barber — for lawyers only, of course.

Aaron Draplin on “good enough”

Graphic designer Aaron Draplin, interviewed at Creative South 2013, in Columbus, Georgia:

“I never indulge in any of this crap where it’s just good enough. Probably lose my ass on like fees and stuff, but I don’t care. Because I’m not gonna let it go knowing that I could’ve made it better.”

I shared that with my writing students, having asked them last week to think about writing as the work of the 職人 [shokunin], the craftsman, whose overriding concern is getting things right, making things better, not for material gain but for the sake of the work.

My introduction to the shokunin: the beautiful film Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

You can watch a short documentary about Creative South at YouTube. Aaron Draplin comes in at 9:10. The words I’ve quoted begin at 11:59.

[If you’re reading in the United States, you may have seen Draplin’s work without realizing it. Draplin is also one of the minds behind Field Notes.]

Midcult PBS

It was pledge week on PBS, and last night they were flogging Dowton Abbey. The voiceover pledge-driver described the series in this way: “It really is smart TV, but as The New Yorker says —”

And here is the New Yorker sentence that PBS then paraphrased:

the British series, about the aristocratic Crawley family and their titular home, goes down so easily that it’s a bit like scarfing handfuls of caramel corn while swigging champagne.

I think the announcer may have changed scarfing and swigging to eating and drinking.

Dwight Macdonald would have appreciated Downton Abbey as a perfect example of what he called “Midcult”:

A whole middle culture has come into existence and it threatens to absorb both its parents. This intermediate form — let us call it Midcult — has the essential qualities of Masscult — the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity — but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf. In Masscult the trick is plain — to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.

The enemy outside the walls is easy to distinguish. It is its ambiguity that makes Midcult alarming. For it presents itself as part of High Culture. Not that coterie stuff, nothing snobbish inbred so-called intellectuals who are only talking to themselves. Rather the great vital mainstream, wide and clear though perhaps not so deep.

“Masscult and Midcult” (1960)

Funny: in a post earlier this year, I described Downton Abbey as “about as deep as a paper plate.”

Smart but goes down easy; goes down easy but smart: that’s a perfect way to understand Midcult.

Related reading
A handful of Downton Abbey posts

[Macdonald’s essay can be found in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (New York Review Books, 2011).]

Frank Sinatra in Brooklyn

[Frank Sinatra, home again, marveling. Good practice for On the Town. Click for a larger bridge.]

It Happened in Brooklyn (dir. Richard Whorf, 1947) offers nearly two hours’ worth of music and pleasant lunacy. Danny Miller (Sinatra) is a shy Brooklynite and aspiring singer returning home from the war. Jamie Shellgrove (Peter Lawford), a shy English aristocrat and composer, follows Danny to Brooklyn. Anne Fielding (Kathryn Grayson) sings and teaches music at New Utrecht High School. Nick Lombardi (Jimmy Durante), Danny’s friend, works as the school’s janitor and lives in the school’s basement. Yes, his basement has a piano.

One highlight among many: Sinatra singing Mozart.

Early in the film, when we’re still in England, a nurse from Brooklyn (Gloria Grahame) asks Danny why he’s moping around now that he’s recovered from mumps. That’s not like a guy from Brooklyn. Even after seeing his photograph of the bridge and quizzing him on borough landmarks, she still suspects that he’s not the real thing:

“Why aren’t you down at that party like a Brooklyn guy should be — makin’ friends for yourself and for Brooklyn? A Brooklyn guy is a friendly guy.”

“Well, I will be, once I get home. It’s easier in Brooklyn.”

“I don’t care how many photographs of the bridge you got. I don’t care how many names of the streets you know. When I see you out makin’ a friend, then I believe you’re from Brooklyn.”

One of the most revealing things about this film is that it has nothing to say about war. The subject never comes up, though Danny is in uniform in many early stateside scenes. The film’s tagline, as seen on this poster: “HAPPY songs! HAPPY stars! HAPPY romance!” What war? This film is dedicated to the pleasures of forgetting, at least for an hour and forty-four minutes.

[The director? Brother to the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf.]

More Salinger

The forthcoming biography and documentary film Salinger claim that new work will appear “as early as 2015”:

One collection, to be called The Family Glass, would add five new stories to an assembly of previously published stories about the fictional Glass family, which figured in Mr. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey and elsewhere, according to the claims, which surfaced in interviews and previews of the documentary and book last week.

Another would include a retooled version of a publicly known but unpublished tale, “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans,” which is to be collected with new stories and existing work about the fictional Caulfields, including Catcher in the Rye. The new works are said to include a story-filled “manual” of the Vedanta religious philosophy, with which Mr. Salinger was deeply involved; a novel set during World War II and based on his first marriage; and a novella modeled on his own war experiences.

Film on J. D. Salinger Claims More Books Coming (The New York Times)

The most convincing evidence that there is a there there: neither Salinger’s widow nor his son will comment on these claims.

Related reading
All Salinger posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Completely Naked City There’s a release date.

Officemates

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

I’ve been sharing an office with them for, like, ever, along with the face in the floor.

[If you’re reading in Go Read, well, you’re missing this post too. There’s a problem.]

Michael Oakeshott on higher education

From the philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990):

A university will have ceased to exist when its learning has degenerated into what is now called research, when its teaching has become mere instruction and occupies the whole of an undergraduate’s time, and when those who came to be taught come, not in search of their intellectual fortune but with a vitality so unroused or so exhausted that they wish only to be provided with a serviceable moral and intellectual outfit; when they come with no understanding of the manners of conversation but desire only a qualification for earning a living or a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.

“The Idea of a University” (1950), in The Voice of Liberal Learning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

Rick Perlstein on higher education

Rick Perlstein on the life and death of educational opportunity:

The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse set of institutions that are the envy of the civilized world. . . .

Now all we seem to care about is reproducing the managerial class.

On the Death of Democratic Higher Education (The Nation)

Everything in this essay hits home.

Thanks to Matt Thomas at Submitted for Your Perusal, who pointed me to this piece.

King and Paar

“Now my mother was a terrible cook . . . probably the worst cook in the world. If I see anywhere a sign, ‘Pies — The Kind Mother Used To Make,’ I get chills all over me.”

At One Foot in Oz, Margie King Barab tells the story of Alexander King’s first appearance on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar. There’s also a Billy Crystal connection. This is history, folks.

A related post from One Foot in Oz
Who Is Alexander King?

[I feel both happy and unhappy about not hitting upon what might seem like the inevitable title for this post: Jack and King.]