Kubrick Self Service Stores

[Kubrick Self Service Store, 1267 40th Street, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I was taking a virtual walk down 13th Avenue, Boro Park, c. 1939–1941, and decided to turn down 40th Street. And there I found this sharp photograph. The name of course struck me. But I don’t think there’s a connection: Stanley Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, where his father was a homeopathic physician. The photograph holds up on its own.

I like the retail density: signage at jaunty angles, canned goods and packages stacked high in the windows, and pyramids on crates. Those pyramids would have to come down each night, but it doesn’t look as if the window displays will be coming down anytime soon. I like the unimaginable prices: 16¢, 23¢, 2 for 25¢. The bicycle doesn’t appear to be for deliveries: no basket. I’m not sure that a self-service store would offer delivery anyway. Remember Mr. Potter, the druggist in Orson Welles’s The Stranger? “All your needs are on our shelves.” I like and don’t like the carriages outside the store, because I suspect that mothers out doing the marketing in this world left them unattended. You couldn’t navigate a carriage and do the marketing very easily. But only the Dead End Kids would make off with a carriage for kicks. I think there’s a movie in which they do just that.

I also like the Wes Anderson-like symmetry. And those curved E s.

Kubrick Stores were a chain, limited, it seems, to Brooklyn, headed by Solomon Kubrick. In 1940 there were three more stores at 1411 Avenue J, 4904 Church Avenue, and 6619 18th Avenue, all wih the same “Kubrick Self Service Stores” sign. A store at 4911 13th Avenue (nine blocks from the 40th Street store) appears to postdate the tax photos. There’s a tantalizing snippet about that 13th Avenue store in Google Books. From The Progressive Grocer (1943):

This is how manager Milton Schwartz, of the Kubrick Self Service Food Store, 4911 13th Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y., went after the booming cereal business right after point rationing began.

End of snippet. But how? How? Inquiring minds still want to know.

There’s little information about Kubrick Stores online. DuckDuckGo and Google have nothing. Brooklyn Newsstand has a couple of robberies, a number of Help Wanted listings, and a single appearance in a group advertisement directed at shoppers (Ajax Cleanser, 2 for 23¢). No obituary for Solomon Kubrick at Brooklyn Newsstand or The New York Times. The most recent glimpse of 1267 40th Street in Google Maps shows — what else? — a mobile-phone store.

Coming soon: the buildings that flanked 1267. Stay tuned.

Thanks to my brother Brian for turning up helpful information on Kubrick Stores.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

Dustin desserts

Hayden: “I have to write a paper about the use of idioms.”

Ed: “Oh, that’ll be a piece of cake.”

And more dessert idioms in today’s Dustin.

Barf

“At dinner with the aspiring public intellectual and her ‘cabal’”: this fawning, gushing New York Times article about Solveig Gold, a Princeton alum, and Joshua Katz, her Princeton professor-now-husband, makes me come close to wanting to cancel my subscription.

An excerpt:

As her guests were about to arrive, Ms. Gold changed from a plain blue summer shift into a more glamorous cinched-waist yellow dress, drawing an approving smile from her husband, who was wearing a pink linen shirt.

She set the long rectangular table in the grass precisely, with a Wedgewood-blue and white tablecloth, cloth napkins tied up in yellow ribbons, place cards inked in a neat cursive hand and melamine dishes in a Provençal design.

The background: Katz asserts that he was fired from Princeton for his political views, a victim of the culture wars. It’s a witch hunt, his lawyer says. An alternative explanation: he was fired for reasons made clear in these two articles (two of many) from The Daily Princetonian : 1, 2.

My take: if you sleep with your students, if you discourage one of them from seeking mental health treatment, and if you pressure her not to cooperate with an investigation into your actions, you should not expect to hold onto your job. You can have nice dinner parties instead and have the Times send someone down to cover them and write about your wife, who was another one of your students. Barf.

[I must point out: the place cards are for a table seating just six people.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg, whose last Stumper (June 4) left me defeated. I found today’s puzzle much more cooperative. It plays well with others, at least if the others are me. I started in the northeast corner with 11-A, three letters, “Call the Midwife airer.” That could be one of two answers, right? I tried one of them and moved to 15-A, four letters, “Shed thing.” Aha: those two answers gave me 11-D, ten letters, “Amateur group for many a sport,” which in turn yielded 15-D, five letters, “‘Few know ____ own strength’: Swift” and 29-A, five letters, “Put up.” This puzzle and I seemed to understand each other well. I got the right and left edges first. The northwest corner: that was the toughest.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, four letters, “Exit sign regulator.” My guess was correct, but it took a while for me to have any reason to think it was.

8-D, four letters, “Performance composition.” ARIA? No.

14-A, ten letters, “Stellar saga.” I thought it had to be a movie title.

16-A, ten letters, “Seven-foot construction.” Is there a name for a massive hero sandwich?

19-A, six letters, “Mentor in uniform.” Surprising.

24-D, ten letters, “Novel numbers.” Nifty! I don’t think I’ve ever seen this answer in a puzzle.

25-D, ten letters, “Not to be answered.” As with 24-D.

32-D, nine letters, “Apt to blow you away.” Literally, or figuratively?

41-D, five letters, “What nearly half a billion call you.” A great clue.

48-A, six letters, “Name close to Washington’s in reference books.” I was not fooled.

My favorite in this puzzle: 45-D, five letters, “Pharmacy figure.” Very clever.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Criterion July

The Critertion Channel’s July lineup, like every other month’s Criterion lineup, is a wow. Noir in color, including Leave Her to Heaven (dir. John M. Stahl, 1945).

A red-herring strategy

James Surowiecki, “Trump Wanted to Join the Mob at the Capitol, and All Right-Wing Media Wants to Talk About Is a Steering Wheel”:

This is, of course, a classic red-herring strategy: by focusing relentlessly on this one minor detail, Trump supporters are trying to draw attention from the substantive, and damning, aspects of what Hutchinson said. And the really striking thing is that they’re doing this even though no one has actually refuted what Hutchinson said.

And trying to parse the blurry footage of Trump in the SUV, as if it were the Zapruder footage of the JFK assassination, is a pointless exercise.

[I always like reading Surowiecki’s one-pagers in The New Yorker. So lucid. They made great models for teaching students how they might construct an argument.]

Dave Lambert and a Blackwing

[From Lambert & Co.: Audition at RCA (dir. D.A. Pennebaker, 1964). Leslie Dorsey, Mary Vonnie, Dave Lambert, Sarah Boatner, David Lucas. Click either image for a larger view.]

Dave Lambert took this group into the studio for what turned out to be an unsuccessful audition. You can watch Pennebaker’s film at Vimeo (free, pixelated) or the Criterion Channel (not free, still grainy). Either way, the Blackwing pencil in Lambert’s pocket is instantly recognizable.

Here’s a 2011 interview with Mary Vonnie with some background about this vocal group came together.

I sent these screenshots to the late Sean Malone a couple of years ago and somehow remembered them today. Sean was the best friend the Eberhard Faber Blackwing (not the twenty-first-century replica) ever had. He was a dedicated researcher of pencil history, a dedicated collector of pencils and ephemera, a brilliant musician, and I’m posting these screenshots in his memory.

Related reading
All OCA Blackwing posts (Pinboard)

“Before my patience are exhausted”

Leopold Bloom is conducting a clandestine correspondence with someone who identifies herself as Martha Clifford. Bloom is writing as Henry Flower, the name on a card he’s tucked inside the leather headband of his Plasto’s high grade ha (the “sweated legend” on the crown of the hat has lost its t ). The correspondence began with a classified advertisement that Bloom placed in the Irish Times: “Wanted smart lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work.” He’s received forty-four replies.

On the morning of June 16, 1904, he finds a reply to his reply to Martha. She has enclosed a flower. From the “Lotus-Eaters” episode:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

Squirrels on metal roofs

I saw a squirrel yesterday in a moment of bravery and grace. It was the squirrel that was brave and graceful, making a leap of six or more feet from a branch to a shingled roof. If there had been a panel of squirrel judges present, they’d have raised their little placards:

10, 10, 10, 10, 10.

But I digress.

This scene made me wonder: how do squirrels contend with metal roofs? I’ve read that they can chew metal (keeping their teeth trimmed) and sneak underneath metal roofs to wreak havoc. But what would happen to a squirrel that made a leap to a metal roof? Would it slide down and be left hanging for dear life, like Scottie Ferguson in Vertigo ? Can a squirrel’s claws grip a metal roof? Do most squirrels know not to mess with a metal roof?

[Asking for a small grey friend.]

Leopold Bloom, proto-blogger

As Leopold Bloom sits on the pot reading “Matcham’s Masterstroke,” a prizewinning story in the magazine Titbits, he thinks about writing something himself. From the “Calypso” episode:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Leopold Bloom, proto-blogger, collecting choice moments of domestic comedy.

Notice that the imagined byline merges Leopold and his wife Molly into a single self: there’s no indication elsewhere that Mr. Bloom has a middle name beginning with M. Androgyny runs through the novel. In the “Circe” episode of the novel, Mr. Bloom will be revealed as “a finished example of the new womanly man.”

And yes, cuffs were once used as writing surfaces.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)