Overheard

“I went to the doctor — I have some kind of -itis.”

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All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Handwritten Bresson

[This story is true. I present it as it is, unadorned.]


[Dear Mother, I am in the M prison.]

Based on a memoir by André Devigny, Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) tracks the plotting of Resistance fighter Fontaine (François Leterrier) to escape from a Gestapo-run prison. Like the three other Bresson films I’ve seen, A Man Escaped has moments of handwriting. And like the other three, the film is completely compelling.

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Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
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Pickpocket

[The film’s title in French: Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, ou Le vent souffle où il veut : A condemned man escaped, or The wind blows where it will. The translations in this post are mine.]

iPads, iPods, Pat Quinn

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, speaking about the creation of a digital-manufacturing lab in Chicago: “When iPads came along and iPods, they helped transform music.” And so too, this initiative will help transform manufacturing.

Okay. But have iPads and iPods transformed music? No. Nor did they arrive in that order. It’s iTunes and the iPod (the app is older) that have transformed the music business. Repeat after me, Governor: “When iTunes and the iPod came along, they helped transform the music business.”

Shouldn’t a governor know such stuff?

Income disparity in higher ed

Inside Higher Ed reports on proposals to reduce income disparity at several American colleges: The President and the Paupers.

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Google Glass on the road

Reuters reports that “Google is lobbying officials in at least three U.S. states to stop proposed restrictions on driving with headsets such as Google Glass.” The states named: Illinois, Delaware, and Missouri.

I can already hear the argument: How can we attract high-tech companies to our state unless we embrace the latest, &c.

Over my dead body, says I. And if it becomes legal to drive with Google Glass, the result will be dead bodies.

[Found via Daring Fireball.]

Gauloises Bleues

[Robert Rauschenberg, Gauloises Bleues. “Aquatint and hand-torn collage of Gauloises cigarette label on white wove Dutch Copperplate Etching, 1968. 253x138 mm; 9 7/8x5 1/2 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 61/75 in pencil, lower margin. Published by ULAE, West Islip, with the blind stamp lower left. A very good impression. Belknap 33.” Image and description found here. The context for this post, here.]

Darn that cigarette dream

I stopped smoking on October 8, 1989. And still — to borrow a line from Brian Wilson — I dream of it. Last night I dreamed that Elaine and I were living out of suitcases in a large house with its own cigarette machine. I bought what I thought was a pack of Merits, a brand I never smoked. What came out was a pack of unfiltered Gauloises, a brand I did smoke, with pleasure. This pack was tan not blue. The rest of what I remember: holding the pack, walking around the house, thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad to smoke a few cigarettes, thinking about how to acquire matches, realizing that I would have to go outside to smoke. But I didn’t smoke. In all the cigarette dreams I’ve had, I’ve never smoked.

I can think of two elements from life that may have shaped this dream. From Monday, lines from Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951):

TWO DIMES AND A NICKEL ONLY

    says this particular
    cigarette machine.

Others take a quarter straight.

And from Tuesday, a conversation with Elaine about the rise in heroin addiction.

Reader, if you smoke, quit. It will never get easier. And you can always dream.

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All OCA cigarette posts (Pinboard)

Naked City mystery guest

[“Without Stick or Sword,” Naked City, March 28, 1962.]

That’s Maung Tun, a Burmese sailor in New York. But who is he really? Your best guesses are welcome in the comments.

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A Gregg Toland moment (Naked City)

[“Without Stick or Sword,” Naked City, March 28, 1962.]

Jack Priestly, the principal cinematographer for the television series Naked City, was an ace. The cockatoo in this shot must be one master’s homage to another.


[Citizen Kane, 1941. Cinematography by Gregg Toland. Click either image for a larger view.]

The cockatoo turns up in Libby Kingston’s apartment in another episode, off to the side, perched on a shelf.

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All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)
King’s Row, another Toland homage

[Yes, the Kane cocaktoo is eyeless. It’s a glitch.]

The Atlantic on social fraternities

The Atlantic has a long report by Caitlin Flanagan, The Dark Power of Fraternities. An excerpt:

Clearly, the contemporary fraternity world is beset by a series of deep problems, which its leadership is scrambling to address, often with mixed results. No sooner has a new “Men of Principle” or “True Gentlemen” campaign been rolled out — with attendant workshops, measurable goals, initiatives, and mission statements — than reports of a lurid disaster in some prominent or far-flung chapter undermine the whole thing. Clearly, too, there is a Grand Canyon–size chasm between the official risk-management policies of the fraternities and the way life is actually lived in countless dangerous chapters.

The student whose story begins this article, the guy who tried to shoot a bottle rocket out of his — well, he made a cameo appearance here in 2012.

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All OCA colledge posts (Pinboard)