Domestic comedy

“Good grief. This was on when we were both sentient beings.”

“I was not only sentient; I was watching.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Contemplating, with dismay, television past.]

Goodbye, Blockbuster

From The New York Times:

Blockbuster, which had more than 9,000 retail stores across America nine short years ago, will close over the next two months the few hundred video-rental stores that it still has, the company’s owner, Dish Network, said Wednesday in a bittersweet but long-expected announcement.

There is no permanence.

Damn you, Dictation

Edifice will die a hero’s death, endowed by the gods with powers to Courson Blatz.

No.

The thing itself, a sentence from the introduction to Sophocles’s Theban Plays, trans. Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff (Hackett, 2003): “Oedipus will die a hero’s death, endowed by the gods with powers to curse and bless.”

Related posts
Dictation and boogie-woogie
Dictation and Derrida

[Blatz is a beer, among other things. What is it doing in Apple’s Dictation servers?]

E-mail? Email?

“Should it be “e-mail” or “email”? Bryan Garner answers.

I prefer e-mail , as in How to e-mail [not email ] a professor. But I’m no “pseudo-snoot eccentric” (Garner’s term): email, no hyphen, is just fine by me.

Sherwin and Zerbina and Bert and Harry

[“Plotz,”Zippy, November 6, 2013.]

Yes, that’s a tabletop’s worth of Ding Dongs.

New Yorkers of a certain age will recognize the fellows on the television screen as the Piel brothers, Bert and Harry, cartoon spokesbrewers for Piels Beer. Their voices were provided by Bob and Ray, Bob Elliott (Harry, on the right) and Ray Goulding.

YouTube has at least four Bert and Harry commercials: one, another one, still another, and one more. A website for collectors of the past has a piece of original art that might have served as the model for what’s on the television.

I like Bill Griffith’s approach to things. Does he worry whether people will get it? No. But someone will. Or maybe they’ll find this post.

Related reading
All Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Susan Sontag: “To collect is by definition to collect the past.”]

Benguiat style

Elaine and I dug the signage in this next-to-last episode of Route 66:


[From the Route 66 episode “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way: Part 1,” March 6, 1964.]

And more recently, we dug the titles in the 1960s educational film You Be the Judge:



I was ready to issue a call to help, but I think I’ve answered my question: the designer behind this kind of lettering, though not necessarily these letters, would appear to be Ed Benguiat. The key word: interlock. House Industries’s Ed Benguiat Font Collection has an Interlock font (with nearly 1,400 ligatures) that pays homage to Benguiat’s work. Here is One minute ’til three in Ed Interlock:



I now realize that Benguiat’s interlocking letters are a trace element in Frank Holmes’s cover design for the Beach Boys’ album SMiLE. And now I’m trying to figure out where else I’ve seen interlocked lettering. Other album covers? Cereal boxes? I am in search of lost type.

Where have you seen interlocked lettering?

*

11:07 a.m.: There’s something similar in a poster for A Hard Day’s Night.

Related reading, sort of
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

[You Be the Judge, produced by Crisco, stars a young Bonnie Franklin. She and a girlfriend engage in a cook-off with a couple of goofy boys. The girls use Crisco and measure carefully, while the boys make a catastrophe of their dishes. And then the girls throw the contest. Some education. The film is available in the educational-film compilation How to Be a Woman (Kino). This DVD and the companion How to Be a Man include several films from Centron Corporation, whose employees created the great 1962 film Carnival of Souls.]

“War of the Welles”

From KPCC’s Off-Ramp: “War of the Welles,” a radio documentary about the Mercury Theatre’s 1938 adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. KPCC also has a re-broadcast of the Mercury program. Both are available as podcasts from this page.

Orange tree art

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Elaine and I have been photographing our Red Sunset maple over the past few days. Its leaves turned all at once. On Saturday, we saw the orange tones you see here. Today there’s much more red. Last year, storms and wind removed this tree’s leaves almost all at once. If that happens this year, we’ll have a keepsake. Which I realize is not keeping with the transience of fall’s beauty but what the heck.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange car art : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

John Lennon on love

“Love means having to say you’re sorry every five minutes”: John Lennon, on The Dick Cavett Show (September 11, 1971).

Other Cavett Show posts
John Huston on James Agee
Marlon Brando on acting
Orson Welles, language maven

[For anyone who doesn’t get the joke: Wikipedia explains.]

Allan Block (1923–2013)

Allan Block was a sandal maker and fiddler whose Greenwich Village shop, Allan Block Sandals, became a center for old-timey music in New York. The New York Times has an obituary.

You can catch a glimpse of the sandal shop in this post on West Fourth Street’s role in an episode of Naked City. The shop’s location, 171 West Fourth Street, is now a tobacco and smoking accessories store. Elaine and I walked past it in May.