Orange Crate Art

Friday, February 14, 2014

A poem for the day, sort of

Elaine and I went to the store, and on the way home we began talking about the plural forms of beef — beefs and beeves. And then this happened:

As Yeats once wrote, “There is always a phantasmagoria.” Always! Happy Valentine’s Day to all.

Related posts
Breakfast with William B. and Edna St. V.
Meat whats?
Mitt Romney: the soul of a poet

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Everything’s Coming Up Profits

[Steve Young and Sport Murphy, Everything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals. New York: Blast Books, 2013.]

The now-vanished industrial musical was a form of capitalist celebration, a show extolling corporate products and services, performed for internal audiences only. O, the titles: Diesel Dazzle. Follow the Road: Highlights from the 1975 Dominion Road Machinery Announcement Meeting. Got to Investigate Silicones. Lucite, You and ’72. My favorite: The Bathrooms Are Coming!

I’ve had a vague acquaintance with industrials via selections from The 365 Days Project. This book, with 425 illustrations, has deepened that acquaintance. If only the songs could play as one turns the pages. But there is a website, with sample recordings. Don’t miss “My Bathroom”: “the only place where I can stay, making faces at my face.” A little Prufrockian, that.

Our daughter Rachel gave us this wonderful book. Thank you, RL.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Sid Caesar (1922–2014)

The New York Times has an obituary.

This sketch is a good destination. Pure delirium.

Meat whats?

I made a snappy joke this afternoon about a miracle involving meat loaves and fishes, and it set off a discussion at our kitchen table: what is the plural of meat loaf?

Garner’s Modern American Usage notes that some nouns ending in -f change to -ves to form their plurals (scarf, scarves), while others add an -s (roof, roofs). Garner gives loaves as the plural of loaf. And when we’re speaking of baked goods, loaves sounds just right. But I’m not at all sure that meat loaves sounds right. It sounds, to my ear, exceedingly odd. But then so does meat loafs, though I’ve tried to hear it as comparable to still lifes:

I painted six still lifes and baked six meat loafs.

Oaf, by the way, becomes oafs.

Reader, which do you prefer? Meat loafs? Meat loaves? Oafs? Chicken?

[The Oxford English Dictionary seems rather British in its definition of meat loaf: “Minced or chopped meat moulded into the shape of a loaf and cooked; generally eaten cold, in slices. Usu. with qualifying word, as beef loaf, ham loaf, meat loaf, veal loaf.” The Dictionary notes that the entry for loaf “has not yet been fully updated (first published 1903).”]

Hyphenating phrasal adjectives

Bryan Garner explains the art of hyphenating phrasal adjectives. In other words, when to hyphenate and when not to.

And there's more here.

[Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.]

Ratner’s (Naked City)

[“The Face of the Enemy,” Naked City, January 3, 1962.]

I like the awning: “1½ HOUR FREE PARKING.” Very practical: two hours would be way too much for a meal.

Ratner’s was a celebrated dairy restaurant. That is, no meat:

[From Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964).]

The theater next door was to become the Fillmore East. Here’s a photograph of worlds colliding, or merging.

There are eight million screenshots in the naked city. This has been one of them.

Also from Hart’s Guide
Automat
Chock full o’Nuts
Greenwich Village and coffee house
King Karol Records and The Record Hunter
Le Steak de Paris
Mayflower Coffee Shop(pe)
Minetta Tavern and Monkey Bar
Schrafft’s

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Alice Babs (1924–2014)

The singer Alice Babs has died. Here is an obituary from a Swedish source.

Alice Babs was a child star, a musician of extraordinary range, and perhaps the unlikeliest Ellingtonian. She provided many bright moments (I’d say the brightest) in Duke Ellington’s Second and Third Sacred Concerts. For instance: “Almighty God,” “Heaven,” and “T.G.T.T. (Too Good to Title).” If you choose one, make it “T.G.T.T.” But if you do, you’ll miss the sheer joy with which she listens to Russell Procope and Johnny Hodges in the first two.

Shirley Temple (1928–2014)

[From the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library Digital Gallery.]

To our fambly, she will always be Little Miss Broadway, as in the 1938 film of that name: “I’m here and you’re here, and thousands more here, but where — is — Broadway?”

Degrees of separation: not that many. My distant relation Tess Gardella appeared in the Shirley Temple film Stand Up and Cheer!

Verlyn Klinkenborg on the English major

Verlyn Klinkenborg on the decline and fall of the English major:

Each semester I hope, and fear, that I will have nothing to teach my students because they already know how to write. And each semester I discover, again, that they don’t.

They can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon. And they get good grades for doing just that. But as for writing clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions and the world around them — no.

I like that phrase — “ventriloquistic syntax.” Making the right noises, so to speak, is one way to make it through the English major. In Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), Stanley Fish has a quintessential description of how it might be done:

A student of mine recently demonstrated this knowledge when, with an air of giving away a trade secret, she confided that she could go into any classroom, no matter what the subject of the course, and win approval for running one of a number of well-defined interpretive routines: she could view the assigned text as an instance of the tension between nature and culture; she could look in the text for evidence of large mythological oppositions; she could argue that the true subject of the text was its own composition, or that in the guise of fashioning a narrative the speaker was fragmenting and displacing his own anxieties and fears.

The cynicism that underwrites this description — performing in codified ways, whatever the object of inquiry, so as to “win approval” — makes me despair. What’s missing is an acknowledgement that works of the imagination challenge our ability to think about them, that they are things to live with, struggle with, and have reverence for. They are not unsuspecting saps on which to run our routines, whatever approval those routines might win.

It’s no fun being a ventriloquist’s dummy. You spend a lot of time stuck in a suitcase, where it’s awfully hard to breathe. There’s the real unsuspecting sap.

Other posts with Verlyn Klinkenborg
On e-reading
On “the social value of reading”
On writing

[Imagine a musician whose thinking about performance resembled Fish’s student’s thinking about interpretation. Who would want to listen?]

Monday, February 10, 2014

George Burns and Tess Gardella

Trekking through DVDs of The Dick Cavett Show, I stopped in my trek as George Burns was speaking. From December 15, 1971:

“I love all kinds of songs, but I make a lot of money by not singing popular songs. Irving Berlin pays me twenty-five dollars a week not to touch any of his numbers. In fact, during the holidays I’m not even allowed to whistle “White Christmas.” But there's a Berlin song that I sing that he wrote and he doesn’t know it. He wrote it for Aunt Jemima a thousand years ago — for Tess Gardell, and she was a great blues singer. And she was a very heavyset girl, and she used to dress up like Aunt Jemima, and she had five musicans on the stage that were dressed up like bakers. And he wrote her this special piece of material. And I played on the bill with her in Montreal. I did an act then called Gary and Smith, Sid Gary and Charlie Smith. I was Charlie Smith. “Fifteen minutes of songs and fun for everyone,” that was our billing. . . . Anyway, I played with Tess Gardell and Jessel, Jessel was on that bill too, George Jessel. . . . Anyway, Tess Gardell was singing this Irving Berlin song. . . . It’s the greatest song:

Hello, everybody, don’t you know my name?
I'm Aunt Jemima of the pancake fame.
You see me in the subways here and there,
In fact I’m on the billboards everywhere.
The pancake business it was slow,
So I got my pancake bakers and went out to get
    the dough.
’Cause I’m Aunt Jemima and my five bakers,
They’re all ragtime shimmy-shakers.
We got kind of tired of the place that we were
    at.
We all walked out and left the pancakes flat.
The boys are good at bakin’, also shimmy-
    shakin’,
That you must —
Anyway, that's the song.”

Too bad Burns didn’t finish. ASCAP’s ACE Index returns 498 Berlin songs, but not this one.

Billed as Aunt Jemima, Tess Gardella (1894–1950) appeared in vaudeville, in the musical theater, and in film. She was an Italian-American blackface performer, best known for originating the role of Queenie in Show Boat. She is my distant relation, my great-grandmother’s cousin.

Despite her stage name, Gardella had no connection to pancake mix or syrup. But she did indeed perform with a band of bakers. A 1920 issue of Variety lists Aunt Jemima and Her Five Bakers of Syncopation as a new act. Here from 1924 is a review of a performance with two-piano backing:

[Variety, September 9, 1924.]

Tess Gardella is still “‘in’ as a pop song specialist.” Listen to her 1928 recording of the song she introduced in Show Boat, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” beginning at 15:23.

The strangest thing that I know about Tess Gardella: the photograph below appeared in the 1974 edition of The Black Book, identified as “Lois Gardella, the original Aunt Jemima, 1933.” A review of the book in Ms. magazine celebrated Gardella as “a beautiful woman!” — presumably African-American. A Gardella cousin (Frank) wrote to the magazine with a correction.

The photograph is missing from the 2009 edition of The Black Book. It seems reasonable to infer from the absence that the book’s makers at first mistook Tess Gardella for African-American.

[Tess Gardella. From The Black Book, ed. Middleton A. Harris (New York: Random House, 1974).]

*

June 18, 2020: An interesting perspective on Tess Gardella, suggesting that her success

was owing not to her perceived “whiteness” but instead to her ethnic positioning between white and black. Like both Jewish and African American women, Italian women have historically been portrayed as matriarchal nurturers – domineering precisely in their excessive capacity for affection — and so Gardella could be hailed as a natural delineator of black womanhood, while allowing the audience a comfortable distance from actual African American and Jewish women alike.

Doris Witt, Black Hunger: Soul Food and America (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2004).