Work with Care

[Nathan Sherman. Work with Care. WPA Federal Art Project. Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Click for a larger view.]

You can explore the world of WPA posters at the Library of Congress website.

WPA stamps

[Click for a larger view.]

From the USPS: “The U.S. Postal Service celebrates posters of the Work Projects Administration, striking and utilitarian artwork created during the Depression by the Poster Division of the WPA Federal Art Project.” The stamps are due out today.

“The world’s choosing up sides”

From Saboteur (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1942). Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), a defense-plant employee, tells the fascist plotter Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger) what’s what:

“Love and hate. The world’s choosing up sides. I know who I’m with. And there are a lot of people on my side, millions of us in every country. And we’re not soft; we’re plenty strong. And we’ll fight standing up on our two feet, and we’ll win. Remember that, Mr. Tobin. We’ll win, no matter what you guys do. We’ll win if it takes from now until the cows come home.”

Related reading
All OCA Hitchcock posts (Pinboard)

UPS My Choice

From United Parcel Service: UPS My Choice is a nifty free service. If you’ve ever come back from a few days away and discovered an unexpected package left at your door, you will appreciate UPS My Choice. It alerts you to upcoming deliveries and allows you to reschedule. Tracks everything too, of course.

[Does everyone else know this stuff already?]

Prelude to a “Choo”

[Nancy, February 4, 1950.]

Hi Flagston’s “Ug!” made me think of Nancy Ritz’s “Ak.” Nancy has just gazed upon a poster for Health Week: “Cover That Sneeze.” Her “Ak” is the prelude to a megaphone-shaped “Choo.”


[Nancy, February 4, 1950.]

Could “Ak” be the etymon of Cathy Andrews Hillman’s “Aack,” “Aaack,” and “Aaaack”? Nah, I didn’t really think so either. If Cathy’s “Aack” has an etymon, it’s almost certainly “Aaugh.”

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
“Kchaou!” (A sneeze in the Odyssey)

Meet the Rubber Man

Meet the Rubber Man, British Pathé (1947).

This fellow would have been a wonderful subject for a Beatles or Kinks song.

Related reading
All OCA eraser posts (Pinboard)

From “The Diamond Mine”

Willa Cather, “The Diamond Mine,” in Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

George Shearing for the Better Vision Institute

[Life, October 15, 1965. Click for a larger view.]

Coming after advertisements for cigarettes (Salem), auto insurance (MIC), coffee (Yuban), and motels (TraveLodge), this page from the Better Vision Institute must have startled Life’s readers. My transcription:

When I heard there’s a campaign to get people to have their eyes examined regularly, I thought maybe I could drive this idea home by writing about it myself (with Mrs Shearing’s help).

Really it should be a law, not just an idea. Seeing is one thing that shouldn’t be left to chance. I know, I never had the chance.

But I have some idea of what I’ve missed. My career as a pianist has taken me to many countries. Judging from the sounds and smells, it must be an unbelievably exciting world to see. I’m not suggesting you’ll go blind because you don’t have your eyes examined. The chances are small but why take the chance? But where a person like me would be grateful to see at all, a person like you has a choice. You can assume your eyesight is all right. Or you can learn through examination that you might be seeing a lot better. I know what I’d do if I had the choice.

George Shearing (1919–2011) was a British pianist and the composer of “Lullaby of Birdland.” There’s a website devoted to his work.

Sergey and Jeff and NPR

Heard on NPR this morning:

Sessions said he should have disclosed two contacts he had with the Russian ambassador in his confirmation hearing.

Oops. Sergey Kislyak knows better than to walk into a Senate hearing. Very bad for business! Revised:

Sessions said that in his confirmation hearing he should have disclosed two contacts he had with the Russian ambassador.

And speaking of should: Sessions should step down.

Related reading
All OCA NPR posts (Pinboard)

[I wrote out the sentence right after hearing it. The newsreader may have said “during his confirmation hearing.” But whatever the phrase, it was misplaced.]

Out to the meadow with Tom Waits

Tom Waits talked to Wyatt Mason of The New York Times:

“There’s an expression in classical music,” Tom Waits told me, one Saturday night in January, when he called to talk about where music happens. “It goes, ‘We went out to the meadow.’ You ever heard that one?”

No, said Wyatt Mason. No, says I. Waits’s explanation:

“It’s for those evenings,” he continued, “that can only be described in that way: There were no walls, there were no music stands, there weren’t even any instruments. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, we all went out to the meadow. It describes a feeling.”

Google and Google Books turn up no evidence of “We went out to the meadow” (or anything close) as an expression in classical music. What is more important: I asked Elaine Fine, classical musician and composer-in-residence, and she’s never heard of it.

Like Bob Dylan before him, Waits is something of a master fabulist, and I suspect that “We went out to the meadow” is his invention. But if anyone has evidence of the expression apart from this Times article, I’d love to see it.

*

7:42 p.m.: From the Waits song “Diamonds & Gold”: “Go out to the meadow / The hills are agreen / Sing me a rainbow / Steal me a dream.” The song appears on the 1985 album Rain Dogs. (Hello, old LP.) And here’s Waits commenting on Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” in 1991: “It is like Beowulf and it ‘takes me out to the meadow.’” Note the quotation marks, as if to signal a familiar expression. But I can find no evidence that there is such an expression. I suspect that the classical-music explanation is a put-on, but I’d be happy to be wrong.

Other Tom Waits posts
Waits on parenthood : Frank Sinatra and Waits

[The Times article is about three musicians: Beck, Kendrick Lamar, and Waits. Total cost of the clothes worn by Beck and Lamar in the accompanying photographs: $8,560. Waits wore his own clothes.]