Elaine Stritch (1925–2014)

Elaine Stritch, Tart-Tongued Broadway Actress and Singer, Is Dead at 89 (The New York Times).

[If my memory serves, this performance aired on the WNET series The Great American Dream Machine.]

“Avoid haphazard writing materials”

Walter Benjamin, 1928:

Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

One-Way Street, in “One-Way Street” and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979).

Benjamin here anticipates my dad’s thinking about abundance and office supplies.

Like Benjamin and my dad, I too eschew the haphazard, though I also believe in “any available paper, any available Bic”: any port in a storm.

[The Chicago Manual of Style, 8.171: “A title of a work within a title, however, should remain in italics and be enclosed in quotation marks.”]

Johnny Winter (1944–2014)

“Johnny Winter, a Texas-bred guitarist and singer who was a mainstay of the blues-rock world since the 1960s, died on Wednesday in his hotel room in Zurich”: from the New York Times obituary. Johnny Winter was seventy.

Here, from 2011, is an NPR interview.

And here, from 1969, is Johnny Winter with nothing but a National guitar and a slide: “Dallas.”

Old-timey dream

I was talking with local missionaries, missionaries of a musical sort, each dressed in black and white. They had traveled to New York City to proselytize for old-timey music. Where did they go? The airports. (They must have modeled themselves on proselytizers of the recent past.)

No, no, I told them, they needed to go to the coffeehouses. That’s where they would find people to interest in the old-timey stuff. Some of the coffeehouses, I told them, are original. I was in earnest, and they recognized that.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)
Greenwich Village and coffee house (From Hart’s Guide to New York City, 1964)
Positively Naked City (A walk down West Fourth Street)

[Some of the coffeehouses are “original.” For instance.]

“Word Crimes”

My Weird Al tolerance is pretty low. But I still think that “Word Crimes” is terrific. It’s a teaching and learning resource for the twenty-first century!

An earlier twenty-first-century resource
Stephen Colbert, Vampire Weekend, and the Oxford comma

Me or I

Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall) speaking, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930):

“No, no, no, that’s me — or is it I ? You know, Markham, I never know.”

I’ve been told that even British audiences have difficulty understanding the dialogue in early Hitchcock films, and I believe it. Some of Murder!, at least in the print we watched, was unintelligible. The Spanish subtitles (no English ones on our DVD) were sometimes helpful, though they left at least one important bit of dialogue untranslated. I think the translator must have given up.

Murder! is well worth seeing, if only to see how much of “Hitchcock” is there early on: the layman pressed into the work of a detective (as in The 39 Steps and many other films), the use of theatrical settings (as in that film and Stage Fright ), the wonderful bits of throwaway dialogue. (See above.) And there’s an eerie moment on a trapeze that made me think of the staircase scene in Psycho.

The cheap videotape-transfer Laserlight DVD that we watched (borrowed from the library) runs about 92 minutes. YouTube has a print that runs about five minutes longer, with a scene that’s missing from the Laserlight disc. (In this scene, a young girl exclaims, “He’s got my pussy!” — meaning cat. Was the scene censored?) The IMDb listing for the film has running times of 92, 100, and 104 minutes. Your guess is as good as mine, or maybe better.


[On the flying trapeze. Esme Percy as Handel Fane.]

Hotel glasses

From a 2012 NBC News interview with Jacob Tomsky, author of Heads in Beds, a book about the hotel business:

“Housekeepers are only provided with cleaners, so they’ll often put some hot water in the sink and put the mini-bar glasses in there with shampoo. Also, they want them streak-free, so they’ll often use some kind of furniture polish just to really get the shine there.”

[Found in a free publication distributed by a local HMO. The HMO’s recommendation: use the disposable cups instead. See also Snopes. Cheers.]

Recently updated

Charlie Haden (1937–2014) With links to a New York Times obituary and a recording.

Henry, sink

[Henry, July 12, 2014.]

This is what a sink looks like, or once did. My grandparents had sinks strongly resembling Henry’s sink, paternal sink in the kitchen, maternal in the basement. I can see and almost smell the bar of Octagon Laundry Soap now.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

[I read Henry online via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.]

Charlie Haden (1937–2014)

Charlie Haden was a giant of music. My recommendation right now: Steal Away: Spirituals, Hymns and Folk Songs (Verve, 1995), an album of duets with Hank Jones. Here is a sample: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” The best way I can describe Haden’s sound: deep.

More: Remembering Jazz Legend Charlie Haden (NPR).

*

July 12: The New York Times has an obituary.