Feel Flows

Having made my way through the 5-CD Beach Boys compilation Feel Flows: The “Sunflower” and “Surf’s Up” Sessions, I ask myself, as I have before: was there ever a group that so veered between the great and the awful? Yes, the Beatles had clunkers now and then (“What Goes On” immediately comes to mind), but the Beach Boys — oh my.

This compilation alone includes “A Day in the Life of a Tree” (sung by a tree), “My Solution” (a mad scientist story), “Student Demonstration Time” (Mike Love’s rewriting of “Riot in Cell Block 9,” with lyrics that equate protest with rioting), “Susie Cincinnati” (she’s the city’s “number-one sinner,” a cab-driver/groupie, it seems), and “Take a Load Off Your Feet” (yes, foot care, with references to avocado cream, broken glass, and sandals). Yikes.

But then I hear the back-to-back album tracks “’Til I Die” and “Surf’s Up,” or the trippy “Feel Flows,” or the staggeringly good live versions of “This Whole World” and “Disney Girls (1957)” or almost any of the isolated background-vocal tracks in this compilation (for instance), and I’m undone. Even “Take a Load Off Your Feet” in a 1993 concert performance is weirdly glorious — and it puts to shame the current assemblage performing under the Beach Boys’ name. I recommend Feel Flows to any fanatic who doesn’t already have it.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

[After a partial rendition of “Nighthawks at the Diner.”]

“So do you like my Tom Waits imitation?”

“It affects me physically.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Marie Wilcox (1933–2021)

Language rescuer and lexicographer. The New York Times has an obituary.

A mobile phone

From Harriet Craig (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1950). Harriet (Joan Crawford) to her husband Walter (Wendell Corey):

“Walter, maybe you’d better not call me. Heaven knows where I’ll be from minute to minute. But I can always reach you. And if you’re not at home or the office, you will leave word where you are, won’t you?”

“I’ll carry a phone around with me.”

He could never have imagined.

Mater

Mater, by Jason Long: “a simple and purty menu bar Pomodoro app” (free) for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Perhaps too simple for some users, just twenty-five minutes, then five, with no other settings and no pausing. (I’d prefer a three-minute break.)

But I like the box in the menu bar, looking like a calendar page or scale: to my mind, it’s a better choice than a display that shows time running down by the second.

Three related posts
The Pomodoro Technique Illustrated : Flow : Pomotroid

A Hamilton House postcard

[Linen texture, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 in. From Digital Commonwealth: Massachusetts Collections Online. Click either image for a larger view.]

The text accompanying the postcard says “c. 1930–1945.” But we know from this tax photograph of 10031 4th Avenue that the Hamilton House could not have been at this location before 1939.

Thanks to an indefatigible librarian for finding this postcard.

Related posts
Green beans and the Hamilton House : Hamilton House cheesecake

The Grapes of Wrath, handwritten

The Guardian reports on the publication of John Steinbeck’s handwritten manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath. At the start is the reminder “Big Writing,” to keep things legible for Carol Steinbeck, who was typing. But the writing gets smaller along the way.

Related posts
Fambly : Steinbeck on the Blackwing pencil : Steinbeck on migrant camps : Steinbeck’s Salinas

And from pencil talk: Steinbeck’s favorite pencils.

Hamilton House cheesecake

“In the mid-nineteen-eighties I made six to eight of these delicious cheesecakes every Monday morning during my time as executive chef at the Hamilton House Restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York”: from chef Monte M., the recipe for Hamilton House cheesecake.

Thanks to an indefatigible librarian for finding this recipe.

Related posts
10031 4th Avenue : Green beans and the Hamilton House

Brian Wilson at his piano (?)

Two tunes, “God Only Knows” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” have now been released from the forthcoming Brian Wilson album At My Piano. I have five thoughts:

~ The performances aren’t especially interesting. They remind me — much too much — of the wallpapery piano music I hear in our nearby antiques mall. Pleasant, but I wouldn’t want to pay to listen.

~ The piano sounds odd, as if it’s been run through a filter and an echo chamber.

~ Given Brian’s typical approach to the piano — pounding chords — I find it almost impossible to imagine that these performances are of his creation. And given recent evidence of his pianism (for example), I find it almost impossible to imagine that these performances are of his creation. Again, it’s not that the playing is especially interesting: it just doesn’t sound to me like what Brian Wilson might be doing at a piano.

~ And these performances at times are what no one person could be doing at a piano. Listen for yourself: there is sometimes a third hand.

~ The Brian Wilson website has nothing in the way of video to go with this recording, an omission that seems telling. I would love to see Brian playing what I’m hearing and feel foolish for having been skeptical. But for now I will stick with my suspicion that these performances have been engineered and assembled. I think there’s more and less here than meets the ear — more than Brian Wilson at his piano and less than Brian Wilson at his piano.

Related reading
All OCA Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)

[There are some poets and musicians I have to call by their first names. Ted Berrigan is one. Brian Wilson is another.]

EXchange names in directories

The telephone directory, informally known as the ’phone book, allows the user to look up the name of a person or business and find their number. Ah — there’s Mr. Passmore’s number.


But the telephone company’s directory allows the user to look up a number and find the name of a person or business. Ah — there’s Mr. Craig’s name.

[From Craig’s Wife (dir. Dorothy Arzner, 1936). Click either image for a larger view.]

Someday I’m sure I’ll tire of seeing exchange names on screen. But not yet.

And, yes, ’phone is slang, or was.

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 : The Case Against Brooklyn : 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 : Escape in the Fog : Fallen Angel : Framed : The Little Giant : Loophole : 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) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : 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 (1) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : This Gun for Hire : The Unfaithful : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?