Marlon Brando on acting

From The Dick Cavett Show (June 12, 1973), Marlon Brando on whether acting is a noble profession:

“It’s been a good living. I mean, if you were in the lumber business, and you were on The Dick Cavett Show, and somebody said, “Well, how do you like the lumber business, Ralph?” It’s a business, it’s no more than that, and those that pretend it’s an art I think are misguided. Acting is a craft, and it’s a profession not unlike being an electrician, plumbing, or an economist. It’s a way of getting on and providing food and shelter for yourself and family.”

Elaine and I have been moving through several DVDs of Cavett interviews. They’re loose and at least partly improvised, sometimes awkwardly so (as with Groucho Marx and Erin Fleming), sometimes hilariously so (as with Bette Davis). The remarkable thing: no one, aside from Brando, is promoting anything — and Brando is promoting Native American causes. My favorite show so far: one with Fred Astaire, who sings Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, and Cole Porter, and dances for one amazing minute. Those things of course were worked out in advance.

Did you know that The Dick Cavett Show has a website?

A related post
William Zinsser on work

[After taping the interview, Brando was followed by the photographer Ron Galella. Brando punched him and broke his jaw.]

Unpremeditated lunchtime magic

Eat a carrot. Then bite into a sandwich, peanut butter on whole wheat.

For just a few seconds, you will taste Pad Thai.

Maslow, revised

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as revised by the Internets.]

I thought of it, myself, I swear. But so have the Internets. I know of no origin for the picture, which I found here.

Some rock’s

On brisk treks that take us through a nearby subdivision (three-mile treks, exactly), Elaine and I have noticed some rocks of a kind not found in nature: large slabs proclaiming glory, as if a household were a bank or investment firm. The slabs stand in front yards and read like so:

The DOE’S

Est. 20__

The date varies. But that apostrophe? Every slab has one. Ouch. Garner’s Modern American Usage explains:

Although few books on grammar mention the point, proper names often cause problems as plurals. The rule is simple: most take a simple -s, while those ending in -s, -x, or -z, or in a sibilant -ch or -sh, take -es.

The householder’s apostrophe, as I will call it, is a common sight on mailboxes or small woodburned signs. There it looks homemade, quaint. On mighty slabs, it looks farcical.

Householders, if you must proclaim your glory to the passerby, think of the way bands manage their names: The Beatles. Or better: The Smiths. Plural, not possessive.

Other posts, other rocks
Some rocks : Zippy : Zippy : Zippy : Zippy : Zippy : Lassie and Zippy : Conversational rocks

[“Some rocks” is a minor Orange Crate Art preoccupation that has developed from my affection for Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy and Bill Griffith’s Zippy.]

Doyle and French

[Marilyn French, The Women’s Room (1977).]

Not long ago I remembered, out of nowhere, that my professor Jim Doyle once mentioned that he was a minor character in Marilyn French’s novel The Women’s Room. Like French, Jim had a doctorate from Harvard (where the novel’s protagonist Mira Ward goes to grad school); I never knew anything more of the backstory than that. But sure enough, there he is on page 346, the (nameless) possessor of a BA from Providence College. Is he elsewhere in the novel too? I would have to reread it to know. I think though that Jim appears in just this one bit of conversation, which I marked years ago in my paperback copy.

Reader, have you known or met a real-life character — in other words, the model for a fictional character? I can think of three I’ve met: William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg (Old Bull Lee and Carlo Marx in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road), and someone who became a character in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. (That last one is not for publication.) Jim Doyle though is the only real-life character I’ve known.

Other Jim Doyle posts
Department-store Shakespeare
From the Doyle edition
Jim Doyle (1944–2005)
A Jim Doyle story
Teaching, sitting, standing

Yet another Big Lots tea find

The International Foods shelves in our nearby Big Lots are empty. It looks as if seasonal merchandise will be arriving there soon. But in the beverage aisle, yet another tea find: Yorkshire Gold. At $2.50 for twenty bags, it’s not cheap (Amazon’s price is better), but it is excellent. Despite the package’s claim, I wouldn’t call this tea malty: it doesn’t compare to a good Irish Breakfast tea. I would call Yorkshire Gold plainspoken and stouthearted. There is a dowdiness about its flavor that makes me remember my paternal grandparents’ kitchen. Yorkshire Gold: une madeleine.

Other Big Lots tea finds
Barry’s Irish Breakfast and PG Tips : Good Strong Tea and Hedley’s : Thompson’s Irish Breakfast : Typhoo : Typhoo and Wissotzky

Matisse in Indianapolis

Worth the drive: Matisse, Life In Color: Masterworks from The Baltimore Museum of Art, an exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (through January 12, 2014). The exhibition includes more than one hundred works from Baltimore’s Cone Collection, the gift of sisters Claribel and Etta Cone, art collectors extraordinaire, who assembled more than five hundred works by Matisse. The exhibition is organized by subject matter: landscapes, still lifes, interiors, nudes, with a final room for the cut-paper compositions of Jazz. Matisse-inspired works by Indianapolis children form a charming coda. Their artist statements are a delight: “The color” reads one in its entirety.

I like Matisse in any color, any size, any medium — I am uncritically appreciative. But seeing reproductions of the many versions of Large Reclining Nude gives me a new understanding of the effort that went into the art.

My one disappointment about the exhibition: the noise level. It’s frustrating to stand and look while hearing not one but two docents leading groups through the exhibit. Elaine used earplugs (which she carries in case of overamplification). If I had had my iPod with me, I would have listened to the groovy sound of Pink Noise.

Here is Elaine’s perspective on our visit. She adds that the earplugs didn’t work.

More deep-focus Lassie

[From the Lassie episode “The Archers,” November 23, 1958. Right to left: June Lockhart as Ruth Martin, Todd Ferrell as Ralph “Boomer” Bates, and Jon Provost as Timmy. They are hoping for the best, which, according to Mrs. Martin, makes the best come true.]


[From the Lassie episode “The Bundle from Britain,” November 30, 1958. Right to left: Hugh Reilly as Paul Martin, June Lockhart, George Chandler as Uncle Petrie, and Jon Provost.]

The beautiful Gregg Toland-like shot I saw last night was no fluke. There’s more to Lassie than I thought.

Kenneth Peach (1903–1988), the cinematographer for these and many other Lassie episodes, began working in film in 1923.

Deep-focus Lassie

[From the Lassie episode “Our Gal” (November 2, 1958). Cinematography by Kenneth Peach. Right to left: Hugh Reilly as Paul Martin, George Chandler as Uncle Petrie, Jon Provost as Timmy, and, of course, Lassie.]

I wonder if this striking shot was a minor homage to the great deep-focus pioneer Gregg Toland.


[From The Grapes of Wrath (dir. John Ford, 1940). Cinematography by Gregg Toland. Right to left: Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, Jane Darwell as Ma Joad, Dorris Bowdon as Rose of Sharon.]

Related posts
Everyday details in film
Joad’s Corollary
Jon Provost, yippee
Lassie and some rocks

[Yes, I watch Lassie sometimes. It’s there, on the television. Woof.]

Man’s Human evolution

“The discovery of a skull could change what we know about man’s evolution”: Scott Pelley, right before a commercial break on the CBS Evening News this evening. But when Pelley reported the story, he spoke of human evolution. We are evolving, sometimes with astonishing speed, sometimes not fast enough.

In a 2009 post about singular they, I wrote:

I find in he or she a still appropriate rejoinder to the language of patriarchy that permeated my undergraduate education. My first undergraduate philosophy course: “The Problem of Man.” The professor was a woman. A key text: William Barrett’s Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958). And then there was William Faulkner: “Man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” Man oh man. I like humankind.

And I was surprised to hear — and see — the language of man tonight.


[Onscreen, right before the commercial break: dumb language, dumb apostrophe too.]

Two more posts with Scott Pelley and Bob Schieffer
Attack of the Clones
Plus ça change