At the Queen Street Police Station

[O Canada! Click for a much larger view.]

Elaine and I both loved this glimpse of office life from Niagara (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1953). Map. Advertising calendar, I think. Rolling chair. Outgoing Mail. And those file drawers. The desk may be a shared one: there’s a framed picture facing away from Sam. Yes, his name is Sam. He’s played by Sean McClory (uncredited), whom I know as Mr. Grace in John Huston’s The Dead (1987).

Niagara is a gripping film, even if its trajectory is easy to foresee. Vacationers George and Rose Loomis (Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe) are a horribly mismatched, tragically fated couple. Fellow vacationers Polly and Ray Cutler (Jean Peters and Max Showalter) are all daylight, laughter, and healthy sexuality. I think of Cotten as a cool, composed presence on screen: but not so here. The early scene in which he pauses in his model-car building to finger an empty Chesterfield pack (as Monroe showers) speaks volumes.

Thanks to Chris at Dreamers Rise for mentioning Niagara .

Domestic comedy

[Elaine observed that this Christmas season has been her busiest as a musician .]

“Is that all Christmas is to you? A great big dollar sign atop a tree?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Elaine too has succumbed to the fatal attraction of Hallmark. So she immediately understood what I was up to with this bit of fake indignation.]

#finals

Checking Twitter for the various acronymic hashtags that go with the life of my university, I see things I’d rather not see. A case in point: a house-party announcement with the slogan Fuck Finals . Finals week starts tomorrow.

As a student, I found finals a source of tremendous stress, never having any idea what they’d look like. I always secretly anticipated that a final might take the form of a single trivia question: What is the name of the third courtier in act 3, scene 2? So I can understand not liking finals. I can understand hating finals. But I can’t understand conspiring to make a travesty of your own educational endeavor.

I used to tell my students: When you tweet to proclaim how stupid your classes are or how drunk you are or to show someone passed out on a floor, you cheapen your degree and the degree of every student from our school. When you add a university-related hashtag, it’s worse.

Related posts
Homeric blindess in colledge (Stupidity and social media)
How to do well on a final exam
How to do horribly on a final exam

“Sunday”

Listening to Frank Sinatra’s 1954 recording of “Sunday,” I was slightly startled to realize that the song depicts American life before the institution of the weekend. Here is my transcription of the lyric, from the first recording, by Jean Goldkette:

I’m blue every Monday, thinking over
    Sunday
That one day when I’m with you
It seems that I sigh all day Tuesday
I cry all day Wednesday
Oh my, how I long for you

And then comes Thursday
Gee it’s long, it never goes by
Friday makes me feel
Like I’m gonna die

But after pay day, that’s my fun day
I shine all day Sunday
That one day when I’m with you

See? Saturday is pay day, the end of the workweek.

Wikipedia has a brief account of the development of the American two-day weekend, which began with a New England mill in 1908. The first union contract with a five-day workweek was negotiated in 1929. But “it was not until 1940, when a provision of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act mandating a maximum 40 hour workweek went into effect, that the two-day weekend was adopted nationwide.” “Sunday,” by Ned Miller, Chester Conn, Jule Styne, and Bennie Kreuger, comes from the 1926 revue The Merry World.

Related reading
All OCA Frank Sinatra posts (Pinboard)

[Why Goldkette? Sinatra takes liberties with the lyrics here and there.]

Recently updated

A small press v. the Salinger estate Now with more details.

Here’s a good way to reduce a college classroom to rapt silence

Post title from experience — and it was a classroom in which no student had ever heard the song, by anyone. The guitarist is Tony Mottola.

Related reading
All OCA Frank Sinatra posts (Pinboard)

Mark Trail revised

[Mark Trail , December 12, 2015.]


[Mark Trail revised, December 12, 2015.]

At least Frank would be home more often.

Related reading (via Pinboard)
All OCA Mark Trail posts
All OCA Frank Sinatra posts

[Now playing: “I Won’t Dance.”]

Frank Sinatra centenary

[Photograph by John Dominis. 1965. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Frank Sinatra was born on December 12, 1915.

This photograph appears to come from the work John Dominis did for the Life feature “The Private World and Thoughts of Frank Sinatra” (April 23, 1965). This photograph did not make the magazine. It’s a curious image: Sinatra looks both young and scrawny (front) and old and pudgy (back). You can see the bald despite the towel around his head. Such a photograph might seem to suggest that Sinatra was just an ordinary guy: he shaved himself one cheek at a time, just like the rest of us. But I say no: because when Sinatra looked into the mirror when shaving, he saw Frank Sinatra looking back.

Sinatra’s voice is among my earliest musical memories. (Thanks, Dad.) I listen often and will be listening today.

Related reading
All OCA Frank Sinatra posts (Pinboard)

[The plastic container on the left? “W. H.”: witch hazel.]

Recently updated

A small press v. the Salinger estate Devault-Graves ends its lawsuit.

Age and happiness

From an interview with Dilip V. Jeste, M.D., a geriatric neuropsychiatrist. He is talking about age and happiness and wisdom. He recently turned seventy:

Q: Are you happier now than you were, say, ten or twenty years ago?

A: Absolutely. I feel that I know myself better, both my limitations and strengths, and I don’t pay as much attention to what others might think of me. So there’s less peer pressure.

For example, the research I am doing right now on successful aging and wisdom, I’ve been doing that now for the last ten years or so — I don’t think I would have done that when I was younger, because it is risky to do research in these areas. . . . Thirty-five years ago, I would have worried about my reputation and so on. Now I feel that I am well-established, and if somebody doesn’t like that, so be it. And now I feel confident enough to continue working on them.

From “Late Bloomers,” a episode of the radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge . I’m happy that I’m giving the show a chance again.

[Transcription mine.]