A Chock-centric post

A flower grew in a Chock full o’Nuts can, in a painting from Page Morton Black’s house. Ms. Black, a singer, was married to William Black, the founder of Chock full o’Nuts. She sang the famous jingle, whose melody was repurposed for a pretty dreadful song, released on a 7″ single in 1984.

Thanks, Brian.

Related reading
All OCA Chock full o’Nuts posts (Pinboard)

[Orange Crate Art is a Chock-friendly zone.]

Maureen O’Hara for Lipton Tea

[Maureen O’Hara for Lipton Tea. Des Moines Register, May 16, 1948. Click for a larger view.]

Barry Fitzgerald appeared in another 1946 ad. Do you see a trend here?

Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

Rights and wrongs, old and new

From The New Yorker, Neal Katyal on Samuel Alito’s thinking:

The question he says the Court should ask is whether the right is firmly rooted in the traditions of the people. And that has always been a controversial way of understanding things, because rights exist in our society at a broader level of abstraction. You don’t say, “Was there a right to abortion in 1787? Was there a right to contraception in 1787?” You ask it at a more general level about the degree of personal autonomy and freedom. But Alito turns the clock back on all of that and says that is not the test. And that is what this opinion says, page after page. It reads like an opinion from Robert Bork, the failed Reagan nominee for the Court, in 1987, who didn’t get confirmed because of exactly this issue. Robert Bork thought there was no general right to privacy, and rights had to be firmly rooted in the traditions of the people, and the right to use contraception, even if you are a married couple, was not something that existed in 1787. And that, to put it mildly, is not just an outdated but also wrong account of what our Founders gave us.

From Salon, Amanda Marcotte on Samuel Alito’s thinking:

Speaking of women’s suffrage, it’s a good thing it was obtained by constitutional amendment. If it weren’t, we can’t be sure that Alito wouldn’t be taking potshots at that right, as well. Alongside his contempt for women as rights-bearing people, this draft opinion is rife with loathing of any social progress made after the 19th century. Alito repeatedly notes that no right to abortion was legally established before “the latter part of the 20th century,” as if the relative newness of the legal right inherently makes it illegitimate.

“Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Zero. None,” he writes, the whiny tone unmistakable.

Of course, there are a plethora of rights that were not established until the latter part of the 20th century.

Women did not have the right to use birth control, have their own credit cards or bank accounts, be paid fairly for their work, or decline sex with a husband until the latter part of the 20th century, either. Jim Crow laws and segregated schools were still legal until the latter part of the 20th century. And, crucially, the rights to have sex in the privacy of your own home — even with someone of the same sex — and to have a same-sex marriage were established even later, in the 21st century.

Alito is aware of all this, and indeed, cites many of the cases that established these rights in his decision. He glibly dismisses the possibility that overturning Roe will lead to the overturn of the right to birth control or any LGBTQ rights, however, claiming that those are different because none involve “potential life.” But just as he claims that there should be no legal distinction between pre- and post-viability abortions, it’s easy to see how one could argue that contraception and homosexuality threaten “potential life” by redirecting sexual energies away from conception. This isn’t outlandish speculation, it is already the argument that the anti-choice movement makes against both legal contraception and legal homosexuality.

I'll add one detail, from page 32 of the draft opinion. Alito says that “attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy” are improper, leading perhaps to claims of a right to use drugs or to engage in assisted suicide or prostitution. Says Alito, “None of these rights has any claim to being deeply rooted in history.”

To insist that a claim to an unenumerated right should be rejected because it is not deeply rooted in history is, really, to reject the possibilities of change and progress that make history worth living through.

Harry Carney’s baritone

From WBUR, a nice feature on Harry Carney and the whereabouts of his baritone saxophone. Carney (1910–1974), a multi-instrumentalist (alto, baritone, clarinet, bass clarinet) was the anchor of the Duke Ellington band, joining in 1927 and staying on for life. Here is Whitney Balliett describing Carney’s baritone sound, a sound “that no other baritone saxophonist has matched”:

It could have housed an army. It was Wagnerian and Churchillian. And it was one of the most beautiful musical sounds ever devised.

It was.

Here’s what I think of as Carney’s greatest moment: a 1969 performance of “La Plus Belle Africaine.” In a post about the recording, I wrote that Carney’s massive sound “suggests canyons, or cathedrals.” I must have had Balliett’s sentences in the back of my head.

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

[Balliett passage from New York Notes: A Journal of Jazz in the Seventies (1976).]

Roe

The New York Times newsletter The Morning has a brief but helpful discussion of the Supreme Court draft decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade, with links to many sources.

I looked at the text of the draft, here and there. The four points I found most chilling:

~ The characterization of Roe as the imposition of “the same highly restrictive regime” on the nation. To characterize a decision that affirms an individual freedom as the imposition of a “highly restrictive regime” suggests to me the “Freedom Is Slavery” logic of 1984. Access to abortion does nothing to restrict anyone’s right not to have an abortion.

~ The insistence that the question of abortion be left to the individual states. What further questions of individual freedom might now be left to the individual states to decide? The right to marry? Access to contraception?

~ The absence of the words incest and rape. The members of the majority are unwilling to acknowledge circumstances for which even some zealous opponents of abortion are willing to allow exceptions.

~ The long appendix of nineteenth-century statutes criminalizing abortion at all stages of pregnancy. From Texas, 1854:

every such offender, and every person counseling or aiding or abetting such offender, shall be punished by confinement to hard labor in the Penitentiary not exceeding ten years.

We are going backwards.

Space hotel

[File under A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do, period.]

Looking at CNN’s glimpses of life in a space hotel, I flashed on another interior, a modern “rec” room, as seen in an advertisement for Motorola televisions, Life, July 27, 1962. Gosh — the future future looks so much like the future past.

[In the hotel. Please notice the cellist, lost in space.]

[In the hotel. No curtains? No thanks!]

[Life, July 27, 1962. Click any image for a larger view.]

Thanks, Ben, for pointing our fambly to the space hotel.

[And by the way, contra CNN, you won’t be waking up with a view of the solar system, most of which will (still) be too far away, even if you’ve left earth. But you might be able to say, with Blaise Pascal, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.”]

Mystery actor

I think he’s instantly recognizable, even through a wet windshield. But if not, the second picture might help.

[Click either image for a larger view.]

Leave your best guess in the comments. I’ll add hints if they’re needed.

*

The answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors
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Donald Evans’s stamps

“Watercolor stamps of imaginary countries”: Donald Evans: Philatelic Counter, an exhibit at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

[And for those of me far from the city, thank goodness for interlibrary loan.]

Outtakes (12)

“Outtakes: Behind the Scenes with the Tax Photo Photographers” (NYC Department of Records and Information Services) has many photographs of the photographers and clerks who did the work of the WPA’s tax photographs. I’ll make a final outtakes post with two group shots.

[Outtakes from the WPA’s New York City tax photographs, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941, available from 1940s NYC. Click either image for a much larger view.]

In the first photograph it’s cool enough for one fellow to be wearing a sweater. But not an umbrella or raincoat in sight, so perhaps the rain was a surprise. I like the camaraderie on display in the second photo, taken in what I like to call shirtsleeve weather. So few hats in these photos: these WPA guys seem like a modern bunch. They’re still unidentified.

Related posts
Outtakes (1) : Outtakes (2) : Outtakes (3): Outakes (4) : Outtakes (5) : Outtakes (6) : Outtakes (7) : Outtakes (8) : Outtakes (9) : Outtakes (10) : Outtakes (11) : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

In Our Time : Antigone

The BBC’s In Our Time takes up Sophocles’s Antigone in an episode that makes an excellent introduction to the play. Edith Hall, classicist: “It will not be long before there is an Antigone set in Ukraine.”

Related reading
Antigone in Ferguson (1) : Antigone in Ferguson (2) : Antigone in Haiti : Antigone as required reading : All OCA Sophocles posts (Pinboard)