Orange Crate Art

Friday, July 31, 2020

Domestic comedy

[The television was on.]

“We have some new polling to show you, and it shows some trouble for the Trump campaign.”

Followed by spontaneous applause from our four hands.

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Ajax and EMTs

I watched a Theater of War event for Zoom last night: dramatic readings from Sophocles’s Ajax followed by a discussion among EMS providers. The actors: Chad Coleman (Ajax), Amy Ryan (Tecmessa), and Anthony Almojera (Chorus). You may know Coleman and Ryan as Cutty and Beadie from The Wire. Almojera is an FDNY parademic. All three read with great power and pathos.

Things I learned: EMTs are woefully underpaid. Their careers tend to be short, with people moving out after a few years. Unlike, say, firefighters, EMTs get little recognition. One participant told a story of a team bringing someone back from death (literally) at a fire, then finding that only the firefighters on the scene were honored at a ceremony. Why? The EMTs couldn’t be spared — too many calls.

It’s all at least loosely related to Sophocles’s Ajax, whom I’ve begun to think of as a quintessential essential worker. He does what needs to be done, giving his all. His community’s survival depends on his effort. His sense of honor runs deep. When he is denied the reward he believes is due him (the dead Achilles’s armor), his sense of betrayal runs just as deep. After an episode of berserking, he reassures his spear-bride Tecmessa and his son that all will be well and walks away to fall on his sword.

Something I thought about after this event: the question “How are you?” One participant said the question prompted a colleague to think about what it really felt like to work amidst a pandemic. Another participant suggested that the question can be dangerous for someone unprepared to offer an honest response. Me, I think it’s probably better to ask. After all, someone can always choose to answer in a perfunctory way. See also “Are you okay?” — a question I found helpful through many years of teaching.

These are times in which we should all be asking one another how we’re doing, and if we’re okay.

A trip to Binny’s

I went to the nearby Binny’s to shop, where I kept forgetting to put on my mask. Where was it anyway? I picked up a few bottles of wine, and filled my cart with beer bottles so that I could compare labels. I met Ben and showed him a small front room, paneled in dark wood, with cheap American beer and brandy on the shelves. I explained that it must be the Upper Midwest room. An employee walked up to ask if she could ask a question. She was trying to figure out how to let people know that the store was open on Sundays. What about putting a coffin in the window? I told her I didn’t think that would work.

Outside I met my dad, and we walked down a brick-paved street. He was barefoot, walking like a much younger man, and I cautioned him to watch for the rat traps by the curb as we walked back to my hotel.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Binny’s: a midwestern chain of alcohol superstores. The traps were the large black boxes you might see along the walls of a big-box store.]

Thursday, July 30, 2020

An EXchange name sighting

[Loophole (dir. Harold D. Schuster, 1954). Click for a larger view.]

Los Angeles lives: this building, still standing at 5639 Sunset Boulevard, now houses JEM Motor Corp., seller of high-end used vehicles. The number is no longer GLadstone 3111.

The exchange name on the cab that’s about to roll out from Tanner: SYcamore.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : Chinatown : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Fallen Angel : Framed : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : 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) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

“W.G. Sebald: A Profile”

Out from behind a paywall at The Paris Review, James Atlas’s “W.G. Sebald: A Profile.” An excerpt:

When I asked his London agent, Victoria Edwards, what he was like, she said she’d never met him. Like his peripatetic narrator, he liked to go for walks in all weather; twice when I called, his wife told me he was “out with the dogs.” The notion of a literary profile bewildered him. “I am glad you liked The Emigrants and quite astounded that you propose to come all the way to talk to me,” he’d written in reply to my request for an interview.

Yesterday afternoon I pulled from a shelf three books by Sebald I haven’t yet read. Finding this profile available online feels like a sign that it’s time to read them.

Related reading
All OCA Sebald posts (Pinboard)

[The text of the profile appears to have been scanned, with conspicuous errors. But it’s free. The books I have read: Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, and a collection of interviews.]

Last words from John Lewis

He wrote them to the published in The New York Times on the day of his funeral. An excerpt:

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

*

One more, coming on a day when Donald Trump* has wondered aloud about postponing the November election:

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Orange car art

Daughter Number Three lightens the day with three photographs of a little orange Subaru. Want.

Related reading
All OCA orange posts (Pinboard)

Word of the day: buff

How rare it is these days to hear someone described as a buff. It’s a decidedly dowdy word. Buffs used to be everywhere: jazz buffs, camera buffs, stereo buffs. They were always male, and they wore madras shorts in summer, particularly at cookouts, where they spoke of Brubeck and Kenton, lenses and pre-amps. In cold weather, they switched to chinos and took the conversation indoors, sitting on mid-century chairs and sofas, with trays of cold cuts and bowls of pretzels at the ready.

That paragraph came from my imagination. The next two do not.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word and explains its surprising origin:

“An enthusiast about going to fires” (Webster 1934); so called from the buff uniforms worn by volunteer firemen in New York City in former times. Hence gen., an enthusiast or specialist. Chiefly North American colloquial.

The dictionary’s first citation is from the New York newspaper The Sun (1903): “The Buffs are men and boys whose love of fires, fire-fighting and firemen is a predominant characteristic.”

It seems that the color name buff — “of the colour of buff leather; a light brownish yellow” — comes from the French buffle, buffalo. The dictionary hedges: that’s “apparently” the origin.

And once again from my imagination:

If we ever go back to having cookouts and sitting on mid-century furniture, the surprising origin of buff will be something to word buffs for talk about. Or does they already know about it?