Domestic comedy

My daughter Rachel:

“There’s no such thing as a free tote.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Used with permission.]

A corner in Marty

[Click for a larger view.]

I’ve long wanted to track down this corner hardware store. Why? Because it’s there, in the Bronx, in Marty (dir. Delbert Mann, 1955). Marty and Clara (Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair) stand in front of Babbin’s as Marty’s pal Ralph (Frank Sutton) calls out from a car: “Hey Marty!”

Babbin’s Hardware & Supply stood at 3530–3536 White Plains Road, at the intersection with E. 211th Street. The business closed in 2001. I was surprised to find a reference to it in a book about the Beach Boys:

We bounded down a flight of stairs and headed up White Plains Road, under the shadow of the Third Avenue El, an elevated subway, in search of this mysterious record. We walked past Babbin[’]s Hardware, Regina’s Pizzeria, Pappantonio’s Laundromat, and the A&P.

James B. Murphy, Becoming the Beach Boys, 1961–1963 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015).

The mysterious record? “Good Vibrations.”

In August 2018 (Google Maps’ most recent shot), 3530–3534 are occupied by Metro PCS, a tax-preparation service moonlighting as a clothing store (?), and Kennedy Fried Chicken. A Caribbean bakery and grill take up 3536-3538. What kills me (as Holden Caulfield might say) is that you can still see those same little squares to the sides of the second-floor windows.

And now to discover that this corner is just a couple of miles from Gaelic Park, where I went to my first concert — Pete Seeger and company.


[Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA Bronx posts (Pinboard)

Hope, strength of

“Hope is more powerful than fear”: Joe Biden, speaking tonight. May it be so.

Catastrophe, disinformation, and true stories

These sentences seem applicable to our time:

While these were the unmistakable signs of catastrophe engulfing the whole country, it was not always easy to get a more detailed picture of the manner and extent of the destruction. The need to know was at odds with a desire to close down the senses. On the one hand, large quantities of disinformation were circulating; on the other, there were true stories that exceeded anyone’s capacity to grasp them.

W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction. Trans. from the German by Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2004).

Related reading
All OCA Sebald posts (Pinboard)

Chris Miller, ugh

Chris Miller is my — ahem — representative in the Illinois House (R-110). Some representative. This Facebook post (publicized by a young man we’ve known since elementary school days, and who was aghast — thanks, Nick) has not, as they say, aged well. Our little corner of Illinois is showing an alarming rise in coronavirus cases. And the pandemic has always been real.

I don’t know when Miller wrote that post. I don’t know if he’s removed it. But I know one thing (as Miller is fond of saying): the man who wrote that post is a fool.

Miller’s wife Mary is running to represent our gerrymandered corner of Illinois in Congress. Trust that Elaine and I and like-minded people are doing what we can to support her opponent, Erika Weaver.

A related post
Practicing (Another Miller story)

Philoctetes and Heracles, yesterday and today

I watched a Theater of War event for Zoom yesterday: readings from Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Women of Trachis by Jesse Eisenberg, Frankie Faison, Frances McDormand, and David Zayas, and commentary from frontline medical providers at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx. Faison and McDormand were especially powerful readers as Philoctetes and Heracles, each of whom suffers unbearable, unallayed pain. Philoctetes’s physical agony, from a snake bite, is compounded by nine years of isolation after he is marooned by his fellow Greeks on their voyage to Troy. His cries of pain and the foul odor from his wound prompted Odysseus to suggest abandoning him. Heracles’s agony results from a centaur’s trick: what Heracles’s wife Deininara believes is a love potion is in truth a centaur’s fatal poison, which sucks the air from Heracles’s lungs and consumes his body. What Philoctetes and Heracles want in their suffering: not to be alone. “Stay with me,” Philoctetes pleads to Achilles’s son Neoptolemus. “You must stay by my side,” says Heracles to his son Hyllus. An event that lies beyond Sophocles’s Women of Trachis: it’s Philoctetes, earlier in his life, who lights the pyre that brings his friend’s suffering to an end.

The sound from Lincoln Medical Center as doctors and nurses spoke was often distorted. But one point that rang out clearly: the immensity of the suffering that the coronavirus may bring — suffering in isolation, suffering for which there’s no cure, suffering that might be difficult for someone on the outside of things to understand. I thought of the hospital photograph of Mark Anthony Urquiza shown on television on Monday night as Kristin Urquiza talked about her father’s life and death. And I heard the words “Stay with me” in a new way.

Related reading
All OCA Sophocles posts (Pinboard) : Ajax and EMTs : Antigone in Ferguson

[I’ve quoted from Bryan Doerries’s translations of the plays. Theater of War is his creation.]

Finding a brother

“Twelve years ago, when I began my search for a vice president, I didn’t know I’d end up finding a brother”: Barack Obama, speaking tonight to the Democratic National Convention.

And:

“This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that's what it takes to win. So we have to get busy building it up — by pouring all our effort into these seventy-six days, and by voting like never before — for Joe and Kamala, and candidates up and down the ticket, so that we leave no doubt about what this country we love stands for — today and for all our days to come.”

Ernie, Nancy, and ExactPic

The graphic designer Khoi Vinh has created ExactPic, a free tool made of shortcuts for editing images in iOS and iPadOS. Resize, crop, frame, and save. Amazing: I can finally tinker with images on my iPhone as I do on my Mac. Why, just this morning I took a screenshot of a Zippy panel, cropped it (in Photos), and then used ExactPic to resize it and add a border. Here, look:


[“Three Rocks Around the Clock.” Zippy, August 19, 2020.]

Two tips: You need to first install at least one “trusted” (Apple-approved) shortcut to be able to download ExactPic. And remember to save whatever image you’ve worked on.

Thanks to Khoi Vinh, whose generosity will make digital life better for many iOS and iPadOS users.

Calamari on the beach

[Representative Joseph McNamara and chef John Bordieri, from, yes, Rhode Island. Click for a larger view.]

Said Representative McNamara,

“Our state appetizer calamari is available in all fifty states. The calamari comeback state of Rhode Island casts one vote for Bernie Sanders and thirty-four votes for the next president, Joe Biden.”

I grabbed my phone and took a picture to send to the kiddos. I waited until this morning to get a better shot from C-SPAN.

Many people found Rhode Island’s presentation delightful. But mileage varies. I found this bit deeply, unintentionally weird, in that low-budget-TV-commercial way.

[Do you remember the This American Life look into “artificial calamari”?]

Halt!

From The Washington Post:

The U.S. Postal Service will halt its controversial cost-cutting initiatives until after the election — canceling service reductions, reinstating overtime hours and ceasing the removal of mail-sorting machines and public collection boxes, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced in a statement Tuesday.