King’s Row, wet ink

[Parris Mitchell (Robert Cummings) writes home. Click on any image for a larger view.]

My dad has told me again and again that I should see King’s Row (dir. Sam Wood, 1942). I finally did. It’s a terrific film. That Ronald Reagan is one of its stars was no recommendation to me, but the principal players — Cummings, Betty Field, Claude Rains, Reagan, Ann Sheridan — are uniformly excellent. Another star of this film: James Wong Howe’s cinematography. King’s Row is one of the most luminous films I’ve seen. Look at the glistening ink above.

There’s a moment in King’s Row in which Howe pays tribute to fellow deep-focus stylist Gregg Toland. Here, from Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941), is Susan Alexander’s bedroom, foreground, middle ground, and background all in focus:



And here, from King’s Row , is Parris’s grandmother’s bedroom:



And now I want to see Transatlantic (dir. William K. Howard, 1931), Howe’s early effort in deep focus.

A deportee memorial

Sixty-five years later, there is a memorial for those who died in the 1948 plane crash that inspired Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” and whose names are now, all, known. In articles on the Labor Day dedication of the memorial, neither the Los Angeles Times nor The New York Times reported those names. The Los Angeles Times did include the names in an article earlier this summer:

Miguel Negrete Álvarez, Tomás Aviña de Gracia, Francisco Llamas Durán, Santiago García Elizondo, Rosalio Padilla Estrada, Tomás Padilla Márquez, Bernabé López Garcia, Salvador Sandoval Hernández, Severo Medina Lára, Elías Trujillo Macias, José Rodriguez Macias, Luis López Medina, Manuel Calderón Merino, Luis Cuevas Miranda, Martin Razo Navarro, Ignacio Pérez Navarro, Román Ochoa Ochoa, Ramón Paredes Gonzalez, Guadalupe Ramírez Lára, Apolonio Ramírez Placencia, Alberto Carlos Raygoza, Guadalupe Hernández Rodríguez, Maria Santana Rodríguez, Juan Valenzuela Ruiz, Wenceslao Flores Ruiz, José Valdívia Sánchez, Jesús Meza Santos, Baldomero Marcas Torres.

There’s much more about the crash and the memorial on this page from KNXT-TV.

If you’ve never heard “Deportee,” or if you have, here’s a version by Arlo Guthrie and Emmylou Harris. Words by Woody Guthrie, music by Martin Hoffman.

Just wondering: how long can a Blogger post title run? I mean, at what point does Blogger just shorten what’s there into something more manageable? Or does Blogger not do that? If it doesn’t, a title could conceivably go on for the length of a screen, or more. Which makes me wonder whether anyone has tried to work out an answer to this question. To do so, you’d have to type and post a really, really long title. You’d have to have some genuine content to it; otherwise, you’d just be running at the mouth — or the fingers — to see how long, or how far, things can go. Such an exercise would be in some way pointless, and yet it might be the only way to answer the question. Of course, any garden-variety advice on making post titles runs counter to the spirit of this inquiry: the usual advice is to make things short, so as to “grab” the attention of readers and make it easier for them to “share” what you’ve written. But, I mean, come on: a short title may be nothing more than merely calculating and predictable, built from “key words” to maximize search-engine attention. OED! Squee! Twerk! And sharing a post with a long title takes no great effort: the words weigh next to nothing, and the URL will exclude all but a fraction of the post’s title. At any rate, I’m not convinced that a short post title is the “key” to anything. I’m still not sure though how long Blogger will let a post title run.

But I think I’ve answered the question to my satisfaction.

Funny because it’s true

This could be my house. Yours too?

A vocabulary quiz

From Bryan Garner, a “20-question vocabulary exam based on Johnson O’Connor’s 1948 book English Vocabulary Builder.”

[I think I should get partial credit for no. 18.]

Nine questions about Syria

From The Washington Post: Nine questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask. The tone is sometimes horribly off (“Oh man, it gets so much worse”), but this beginnerly Q. and A. might be useful.

[WaPo, can’t your writers write for younger readers without patronizing them?]

From the -wise world

Thinking they saw criminals, Beaver and Gilbert called the cops, pretending to be Ward Cleaver. But the criminals were only Lumpy Rutherford and a pal, masked for a costume party. Indignant Fred Rutherford calls the Cleaver residence to vent:

“Ward, this comes as quite a blow to me, friendship-wise.”

In 1962, that line would have struck an alert viewer as obviously funny, an acknowledgement of -wise on the rise. The Elements of Style mocked the suffix; Life mocked it; Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond mocked it.

And now? Garner’s Modern American Usage allows for useful neologisms (taxwise ) and playful constructions but cautions:

Generally, avoid -wise words or compounds when the suffix means “regarding” or some other frame of reference. They typically displace a more direct wording, and they’re invariably graceless and inelegant.

That’s wise -wise advice.

Related posts
“They’re opinion-wise”
-wise wise

[From the Leave It to Beaver episode “Beaver’s Long Night,” February 3, 1962.]

Murray Gershenz (1922–2013)

Murray Gershenz, the used-record dealer known as Music Man Murray, has died at the age of ninety-one. From the Los Angeles Times obituary:

The store attracted entertainers like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and B. B. King looking for their own earlier work, as well as ordinary lovers of hard-to-find music, such as Richard Parks, who made a documentary about Gershenz and his records.

“I started collecting old hillbilly music in high school and Music Man Murray was on the list of places you had to go to find that kind of stuff,” said Parks, whose Music Man Murray came out in 2012. “He was the godfather of the used-record store.”

Here is the film’s website.

[Found via Van Dyke Parks’s Twitter.]

FeedBurner FeedBlitz FeedBurner

After a two-day dalliance with FeedBlitz, I am again using FeedBurner to feed the Orange Crate Art feed to feed readers. Why? I found that FeedBlitz returns the same up-and-down stats as FeedBurner. FeedBlitz is not to blame: the source of the problem is the flickering ghost of Google Reader. But I can’t see paying a monthly fee when I can get flaky numbers for free.

If you want to read Orange Crate Art in a reader, subscribe via FeedBurner. That’s the link.

Zinsser on work

William Zinsser on the work of writing and other kinds of work:

I’ve never defined myself as a writer, or, God forbid, an author. I’m a person — someone who goes to work every morning, like the plumber or the television repairman, and who goes home at the end of the day to think about other things. . . .

It may seem perverse that I compare my writing to plumbing, an occupation not regarded as high-end. But to me all work is equally honorable, all crafts an astonishment when they are performed with skill and self-respect. Just as I go to work every day with my tools, which are words, the plumber arrives with his kit of wrenches and washers, and afterward the pipes have been so adroitly fitted together that they don’t leak. I don’t want any of my sentences to leak. The fact that someone can make water come out of the faucet on the 10th floor strikes me as a feat no less remarkable than the construction of a clear declarative sentence.

“Life and Work: Why Plumbers Are Good Role Models for Writers,” in The Writer Who Stayed (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2012).

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William Zinsser, listening
William Zinsser, writing advice