A third police station

[Rusell Crowe as Officer Wendell “Bud” White. L.A. Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson, 1997). Click for larger views.]

File cabinets in front of them, file cabinets in back of them. Files, files, everywhere. I must admit: during the fight scene between Office White and Detective Lieutenant Edmund “Ed” Exley (Guy Pearce), I was betting on the file cabinets.

We caught on to L.A. Confidential via Los Angeles Plays Itself (dir. Thom Andersen, 2003). Curtis Hanson’s film is funny, shocking, sleazy, violent, and full up on twists and turns — and file cabinets. Jeannine Oppewall received an Oscar nomination for Best Art Direction (a category now called Best Production Design).

This police-station-from-the-movies is the third in recent weeks to leave our household in awe.

Other films, other police stations
Niagara : East Side, West Side

Domestic comedy

[Re: Garrison Keillor .]

“He makes people happy.”

“Well, they may think they’re happy.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Overheard

[Out to eat .]

“. . . she read the straight average, not the weighted average . . .”

“. . . ”

“. . . so I filled out an evaluation just like anyone else. But there were no categories . . .”

“. . . ”

“. . . sixty thirty-second commercials . . .”

“. . . ”

“. . . and the other is one-oh-four-point-three . . .”

“. . . ”

“. . . does she do all of them, or just the specials?”

“. . . ”

It felt like David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King .

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
A post with more about the Wallace ellipsis

A joke in the traditional manner

Did you hear about the thieving produce-clerk?

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? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : 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 does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : 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 toy, the squirrel-doctor, Marie Kondo, Santa Claus, and this one.]

NYT sanitizes DFW

In marking the twentieth anniversary of the publication of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (February 1, 1996), The New York Times has sanitized an often-quoted sentence from a Wallace interview. Here’s Wallace, speaking with Larry McCaffery in 1993:

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.

And now Tom Bissell, writing in the Times :

In interviews, Wallace was explicit that art must have a higher purpose than mere entertainment: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a . . . human being.”

Bissell’s piece is excerpted from his foreword to a forthcoming twentieth-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest . The word explicit is odd here, as the Times — I assume it’s the Times, not Bissell — has chosen to be less than explicit.

The excision of fucking may be less deplorable than the outright rewriting a Philip Larkin poem in a 2012 review by Michiko Kakutani: “They mess you up, your mum and dad.” But the Times hasn’t only removed a word: the added ellipsis may too easily be read as an indication of a hesitation or pause in Wallace’s speaking, changing his blunt, inelegant remark into a moment of bathos: “a . . . human being.” It would be easy enough for the Times to suggest the full content without resorting to the ellipsis: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a [f---ing] human being,” or “Fiction’s about what it is to be a [****ing] human being.” They mess you up, The New York Times .

Related reading
All OCA DFW posts (Pinboard)

A Henry report card

[Henry , January 30, 2016.]

That’s how report cards were packaged when I was a kid. The little notch in the envelope’s edge is the giveaway.

The teacherly grimace was optional.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

Back to Springfield

A surprise in the Chicago Tribune tonight:

President Barack Obama will return to Springfield next month to deliver a speech under the Capitol dome where he once served as a state senator, bringing the spotlight of the presidency to a building where home-state political struggles have led to a historic budget stalemate.

The Tribune quotes a spokesman for the Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan as saying that Obama was invited “several years ago.” But the paper also reports that Senate President John Cullerton sent a letter to Obama on January 19 “suggesting it was a good time for a return.” To my mind, Cullerton decided to turn on the Bat-Signal, and I am looking forward to whatever our president can say and do to help end the state’s budget crisis and lessen its political dysfunction.

Related posts
Illinois’s higher-ed crisis
“Horrible” (More of the same)
Three Rauner thoughts (The State of the State address)

Sanders-Warren?

Elizabeth Warren has written an opinion piece for The New York Times about corporate criminality and the things a president can do about it without the Congress. Warren is highly critical of what she sees as the Obama administration’s unwillingness to punish corporate wrongdoers. An excerpt:

In a single year, in case after case, across many sectors of the economy, federal agencies caught big companies breaking the law — defrauding taxpayers, covering up deadly safety problems, even precipitating the financial collapse in 2008 — and let them off the hook with barely a slap on the wrist. Often, companies paid meager fines, which some will try to write off as a tax deduction.

The failure to adequately punish big corporations or their executives when they break the law undermines the foundations of this great country. Justice cannot mean a prison sentence for a teenager who steals a car, but nothing more than a sideways glance at a C.E.O. who quietly engineers the theft of billions of dollars.

Compare Bernie Sanders:

It is not acceptable that many young people have criminal records for smoking marijuana, while the CEOs of banks whose illegal behavior helped destroy our economy do not.

I may be misreading, but I strongly suspect that Elizabeth Warren will soon endorse Bernie Sanders. And I strongly suspect that she will be Sanders’s choice for a running mate. A Sanders-Warren ticket would be, for many voters, enormously exciting.

A second police station

[James Mason as Brandon Bourne, William Conrad as Lieutenant Jake Jacobi. Click for a larger view.]

East Side, West Side (dir Mervyn LeRoy, 1949) is the second film in recent memory that has made our household remark on the splendors of a police station. (The first: Niagara .) Roughly clockwise: framed picture of handgun types, radiator, metal window screening, schoolhouse-style light, fan, coat rack, file cabinets, transom window, metal light-shade, teletype machine (?), fedora, fedora, telephone, telephone, desk lamp, wire tray, file box, thermos, telephone, desk lamp, fedora, metal light-shade.

Also from this film
An EXchange name on screen

An EXchange name on screen

East Side, West Side (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1949) is now packaged as a “mystery-melodrama,” but it’s really an example of the so-called “woman’s picture,” presenting a tangle of mismatched and would-be partners: Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason, Ava Gardner, Van Heflin, and Cyd Charisse. William Frawley (Fred Mertz) plays a bartender. And there’s a telephone-exchange name:



We know from dialogue that it’s CHelsea.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire