Ranking Roger (1963–2019)

Ranking Roger, Roger Charlery, singer with The Beat (aka The English Beat) and related groups, has died at the age of fifty-six. The New York Times has an obituary.

I was a big fan of The Beat in my youth. I swear — this past Tuesday, I wondered, out of nowhere, Whatever became of Ranking Roger? His death is a shock.

Three of my favorite Beat recordings: “Jackpot”, “The Limits We Set,” and “Whine & Grine / Stand Down Margaret.” And here’s a short set from the Beat in concert, September 26, 1980 at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey.

[I saw the Mahavishnu Orchestra at the Capitol Theatre in — 1974? Time blurs. Still the loudest music I’ve ever heard.]

Punctuation in the news

The Blast (whatever that is) reports that Olivia Jade Giannulli risks having her trademark applications rejected because of poor punctuation. “Proper punctuation in identifications is necessary to delineate explicitly each product or service within a list and to avoid ambiguity,” says the United States Patent and Trademark Office. And: “Commas, semicolons, and apostrophes are the only punctuation that should be used.”

But look at this sentence from The Blast itself:

Officials from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office claim Olivia Jade’s applications for “make up kits” with “moisturizer” and “concealer” is too broad and needs to be specified.

Agr, I would have to scrawl in the margin. Or, if I were in a more expansive mood, s-v agr.

March 28: People has the problem-punctuation passage:

make up kits comprised of moisturizer, primer, concealer, foundation, make-up powder, make-up pencils, eye make-up, eyeshadow, eye liner, mascara, blush, highlighter, bronzer, make-up setting spray lipstick lip gloss, lip stains, make-up remover.

[Olivia Jade Giannulli: daughter of Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, sister of Isabella Giannulli, all caught in the recent college-admissions scandal.]

No more Butcher’s Crossing

Our household’s two-person Four Seasons Reading Club sometimes finds it necessary to leave a book unfinished. So it is with John Williams’s 1960 novel Butcher’s Crossing. We never made it out of the third chapter. By page 24 I began to tire of Williams’s approach to narrative:

In the darkness he walked across his room to the small table, which was outlined dimly beside the window. He found a match on the table and lit the lamp beside the washbasin. In the mirror his face was a sharp contrast of yellow brightness and dark shadow. He put his hands in the lukewarm water of the basin and rinsed his face.

Hemingwayesque, perhaps, but these actions, unlike, say, those of Nick Adams in “Big Two-Hearted River,” are inconsequential. There’s nothing behind them, at least not that I can see: everything in the novel is described with the same tedious exactness. And the writing — dimly, sharp contrast, dark shadow, of the basin — is kinda slack.

By page 27, I was squirming at the description of a character’s skin as “slightly yellowed and cured like smooth leather.” Yep, they’re going to go after buffalo. But it was a passage on page 30 that made me quit:

The sight of the whisky had calmed Charley Hoge; he took the glass in his hand and drank rapidly, his head thrown back and his Adam’s apple running like a small animal beneath the gray fur of his bearded throat.

That overwrought simile. And the narrator refers to this character by both first and last names every time he’s mentioned. Elaine, too, reached her limit on page 30, with a bit of corny dialogue about “whores”:

“Some of them even get married; make right good wives, I hear, for them that want wives.”

Them that want right good reading might look to Williams’s Stoner. But this novel of life out west, where men are men, and women are whores, and Adam’s apples run like small animals, isn’t it.

[John Williams’s four novels are now all available from NYRB.]

“A worm in the cheese”

The rector of the Church of Sant’Anna is explaining things to Professor Laurana:


Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own. 1968. Trans. Adrienne Foulke. (New York: New York Review Books, 2000).

To Each His Own is the second work of Sciascia’s I’ve read. It’s a terrific novel, tracing the efforts of high-school teacher Paolo Laurana to piece together clues related to a death threat and double murder. Even when the killer’s identity begins to feel certain, the ultimate ending remains a surprise. The greatest pleasures of the novel come in its scenes of conversation, with commentary on aesthetics, ethics, literary history, philosophy, politics, religion, and Sicilian life. Another NYRB find!

A related post
From The Day of the Owl

‎Seashore at the App Store

Seashore, an excellent free image-editor for the Mac, has moved from SourceForge to the App Store. Now works with the most recent versions of macOS, including Mojave.

“Bill Barr’s Weasel Words”

“For now, all we have is the letter. And it doesn’t show that Trump is innocent of collusion or obstruction. It shows that collusion and obstruction were defined to exclude what he did”: from “Bill Barr’s Weasel Words,” a deft display of close reading by William Saletan (Slate).

Hudson Yards and the Grand Cosmo

Writing in The New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz likens Manhattan’s Hudson Yards to “an amenity-stuffed Hotel California that its residents never have to leave. . . . The only thing that Hudson Yards is missing is its own weather.”

A Manhattan model for Hudson Yards can be found in Steven Millhauser’s novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. Starting as a boy working in his father’s cigar store, Martin rises “to a height of dreamlike good fortune” as a builder of hotels. His final achievement is the Grand Cosmo, which opens in 1905. It’s a strange place: “people didn't know exactly what it was.” Promoting it is a challenge, as Martin has placed a significant restriction on the work of his advertising genius Harwinton:


Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (New York: Vintage, 1996).

“A complete and self-sufficient world”: Hudson Yards advertises itself as a place to live, shop, work, and dine. (Not eat.) There’s even, as Schwartz notes, a hot-dog stand in what the developer calls “the neighborhood of the future.” I suppose you can dine on hot dogs if you’re a tourist in the neighborhood.

I expect that someday I’ll visit New York and everything I love about the city will have been obliterated. All that will be left: a theme park whose price of admission I cannot — and would not want to be able to — afford.

Ohio place names, pronounced

My daughter Rachel alerted me to a Twitter thread about the pronunciation of Ohio place names. Includes “Menner” (Mentor), which captured our familial imagination in 2017.

Thank you, Rachel.

Still more pencil cups

Elaine Walizer shared these photographs — with captions no less. Click any image for a larger view.


[“Note stylus and letter opener (from Dick Deutsch Printing Co. Warner Bros. Bldg. Phone Prospect 0091).”]


[“This pencil holder is more strategically placed and includes scissors, tweezers, an furled flag, and a mystery object.... revealed below.”]


[“Great for prying things open or up or out... I don't mind folding things; the sad iron is my solution to avoid actually ironing the napkins. (We don't use paper ones.)”]

Thanks, Elaine. The pryer looks pretty powerful. The telephone exchange name for Dick Deutsch Printing is a bonus. But wait: who was Dick Deutsch? And what did he print? Prints. That is, of movies.

From The Film Daily, January 7 and 15, 1936:

Cleveland — Dick Deutsch of the Dick Deutsch Printing Co., has left for a three-week vacation in Miami.

*

Dick Deutsch of Dick Deutsch Printing Co. is back from a vacation in Florida.

And from the same publication, more eventful news from July 17, August 6, August 20, and September 5, 1940:

Richard Deutsch, head of the Dick Deutsch Printing Co., has broken ground at Cedar Ave. and E. 107th St., for a sports coliseum.

*

HERBERT OCHS, Real Art franchise (with his son JACK, DICK DEUTSCH, o[f] Dick Deutsch Printing Co., accompanied by DEUTSCH and son, JEFFREY are in New [York?] from Cleveland.

*

Cleveland — Pioneer Film Exchange has been formed by Herbert Ochs and Richard Deutsch to handle franchises on Film Alliance product and Select Attractions. The Film Alliance franchise covers Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Indiana. The
Select franchise is for Ohio and Kentucky. Pioneer Film Exchange is located in the Warner Bldg.

*

Thieves broke into the shipping room of the Warner Building and stole nine complete features belonging to Herbert Ochs and Dick Deutsch of Pioneer Film Exchange. The cans were waiting to be picked up for shipment. This is the biggest film theft ever reported in Cleveland.

The features stolen were two prints of “The Leopard Man,” two prints of “Suicide Legion,” two prints of “The Challenge,” one print of “Song of the Road,” one of “Spy Bureau” and one of “Treachery on the High Seas.” Ochs reports that due to the co-operation of Film Alliance and Select Attractions which shipped in duplicate prints by air express Pioneer was able to complete all of its obligations and theaters received their prints on time.

More pencil holders: from Elaine Fine, Fresca, George, Sara, Slywy, and me.

Domestic comedy

“I could do folding, but I don’t feel like it. I put in a long day at the pageant.”

Related reading All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Elaine spent a couple of hours at a pageant yesterday waiting to hear one of her students perform.]