Asti’s

A reader left a comment on a post about West Fourth Street and Naked City recalling Asti’s Restaurant. Like Bianchi & Margherita, a restaurant mentioned in that post, Asti’s offered opera-centric dining. From Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964):

ASTI’S
CAPACITY 150
13 E. 12th St.
(bet. Fifth Ave. and University Pl.)
AL 5-9095

5 PM–2:30 AM, TUES. THRU SUN. CLOSED JULY, AUG.

MINIMUM: $3, FRI. AND SAT.
NO CHARGE AT BAR.

If you like opera, you’ll like Asti’s. The hired hands provide the diversion. Whenever the bouncer, barmaid, bus boy, or barkeep feels an aria coming on, the warbler just passes a signal to the pianist and lets go.

And what you’ll hear is surprisingly good, for most of the staff has had professional operatic experience. The singing of the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore is a sure-fire tour de force . Accompanying the chorus, there is a tintinnabulation of clinks coming from the glasses on the bar as they are struck rhythmically by the attendants.

Everything here has an Italian accent — the strains from Verdi and Puccini, the cuisine, and the gusto which which with which the staff discharges its chores. The food is adequate. Suffice it to say that it’s worthwhile to come here for the singing which is lusty, continuous, and thoroughly exhilarating. A table d’hote dinner, averaging $6, is served till 10, after which an à la carte supper menu takes over.

Asti’s, or Asti, began as a speakeasy in 1924 or ’25 and closed on December 31, 1999. By the end of its life, the restaurant had 1,200 photographs of opera singers on its walls. The building now houses Strip House, a steak place.

As much as I love the idea of an Asti’s or a Bianchi & Margherita, the relentlessness of it all would leave me exhausted. (I am a highly sensitive person.) This short documentary gives some idea of what an evening at Asti’s might have been like.

Thanks, Jeff, for pointing me to Asti’s.

Related reading
An Asti’s menu (eBay)

[I would have scanned the entry from Hart’s Guide, but I didn’t want to risk damaging the book’s spine.]

John Rabe and David Foster Wallace

John Rabe, the host of KPCC’s Off-Ramp, interviews Dan John Miller, the actor who plays an NPR host interviewing David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour (dir. James Ponsoldt, 2015). That host was Rabe, who interviewed Wallace for Minnesota Public Radio in 1996. Also available from the link above, the 1996 interview itself.

My favorite moment from 1996: “Bayer is a name I trust.”

A related post
My take on The End of the Tour

A joke in the traditional manner

What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children?

No spoilers. The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He gets credit for all but the cow coloratura, the squirrel-doctor, Santa Claus, and this one.]

Domestic comedy

“8:30?”

“8:30.”

“I feel like I’m signing a contract.”

“You are.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

The End of the Tour

The End of the Tour (dir. James Ponsoldt, 2015) is a likable and unlikable film. I found less bromance than I had anticipated (and dreaded), several moments of high seriousness and emotional darkness, and (via Joan Cusack) some sweetly comic relief. The relationship between interviewer David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) and interviewee David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), which develops over five days of talk and travel, is never without its duplicities. Does Wallace offer Lipsky a “guest-roomish” spare bedroom out of sheer hospitality, or is the interviewee trying to disarm his interviewer early on? Lipsky’s snooping around in medicine cabinets and empty rooms is less ambiguous.

Jason Segel has an uncanny grasp of Wallace’s speaking voice — or of one Wallace voice, the plain-ordinary-guy voice. (Here is a different Wallace voice.) But in appearance, Segel’s Wallace is grotesque: slovenly, hulking, and slightly crazed-looking. My offhand nominee for a more convincing Wallace: Edward Burns.

The edited transcript of Lipsky and Wallace’s conversations appeared in book form as Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010). This film might better have been titled Although of Course You End Up Becoming a Caricature of Yourself.

But worth seeing, even if only to satisfy a reader’s curiosity.

Related reading
All OCA David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

Life and death and Molly Dodd

Elevator operator/doorman Davey McQuinn (James Greene) to Molly Dodd (Blair Brown):

“Life goes on, Miss Dodd. Count on it.”

That’s from The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd episode “Here’s a Bunch of Photos from an Old Album” (April 14, 1988), in which Molly’s father dies.

Our household loves The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.

Related posts
Molly Dodd, Molly Dodd, Molly Dodd
Molly Dodd, Mongol user

How to enter a classroom

[Assuming there’s still a classroom to enter. Advice for college students, for “syllabus week” and beyond.]

1. Put away any devices before entering, so that you can be marked “present” — that is, fully present, ready to engage whatever will be going on. It’s a sad and dopey feeling for an instructor to find a roomful of students intent on their devices.

2. If your instructor has not arrived and the room is dark, turn on the lights. It’s a sad and dopey feeling for an instructor to find a roomful of students sitting in the dark. If an instructor is present and the room is dark, there may be a PowerPoint presentation in the offing. Uh-oh.

3. Don’t sit toward the back. It’s a sad and dopey feeling for an instructor to find a roomful of students sitting toward the back.

The only thing worse than finding a roomful of students intent on their devices is finding a roomful of students intent on their devices and sitting in the dark. And the only thing worse than finding a roomful of students intent on their devices and sitting in the dark is finding a roomful of students intent on their devices and sitting in the dark toward the back. A teacher with sufficient gumption will ask students to put away the devices and move toward the front. That teacher will also turn on the lights, and even ask that students do so in the future.

For the first time since 1961, falltime won’t mean for me the start of “school.” (Even during sabbaticals, life is governed by the academic calendar.) It feels exciting to be back in a pre-kindergarten environment. But I still think about what goes in school.

Related posts
How to answer a professor (Guest post by Stefan Hagemann) : How to be a student a professor will remember (for the right reasons) : How to e-mail a professor : New year’s resolutions : Rule 7 : Seeing professors clearly : Syllabus week

Universities, hedge funds, and private equity funds

Victor Fleischer writes about “the symbiotic relationship between university endowments and the world of hedge funds and private equity funds”: “Stop Universities from Hoarding Money” (The New York Times).

As The Arthurian pointed out in a comment on a recent post, Fleischer’s observations go well with a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson that Stefan Hagemann quoted in an earlier comment on that post:

Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.

VW punctuation

“It’s important to stop at the right moment”: fun with punctuation in three advertisements for the Volkswagen Passat.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)

[No. 2 though would work better with items in a series: x , y , and z .]

Lassie Ticonderoga

[Timmy (Jon Provost) and Ruth Martin (June Lockhart). And, of course, Lassie. From the Lassie episode “The Owl,” September 28, 1958. Click for a larger view.]

In a farmhouse just outside Calverton, the pencil of choice is the Dixon Ticonderoga. The ferrule gives it away. There’s also an episode in which Timmy sits at the kitchen table and writes a note with a Ticonderoga, but I can find no trace of that epsiode online.

Other Ticonderogas
Bells Are Ringing : The Dick Van Dyke Show : Harry Truman with Ticonderoga : The House on 92nd Street : Pnin