Pocket notebook sightings

[Lovett (Edward Everett Horton) records his thoughts. From Lost Horizon (dir. Frank Capra, 1937). Click any image for a larger view.]

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Fearmakers : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

The price of fish

From Roses Are Red (dir. James Tinling, 1947), a line worthy of a villain — say, perhaps, John Candy in an SCTV parody. It’s spoken by Jim Locke (Edward Keane), crime boss and aquarist, as he stares at his critters:

“There's always a price – with men or fish.”

Feed, me

I am having daily problems with my blog’s feed. If you aren’t seeing posts, please know that I post once or twice every morning. Though if you aren’t seeing posts, I don’t know how this one would help. Maybe IF I SHOUT?

No, too rude.

If I decide to switch from FeedBurner, I’ll give notice in a post.

*

Posts at the FeedBurner Help Group suggest a general problem.

Bebop

The New York Times offers a tasting menu, with five minutes of music that are meant to make you love bebop. It prompted me to make a menu of my own. It’s a tasting menu, so I’m omitting the detailed info I usually post with music:

From Charlie Parker, “Embraceable You” and “Ko-Ko.” A beautiful ballad and musical cubism.

From Dizzy Gillespie (and Charlie Parker), “Salt Peanuts.” Frenzy!

From Bud Powell, “Parisian Thoroughfare” and “Tea for Two.” Lyrical piano and a dash through chord changes.

From Thelonious Monk, “Brilliant Corners” and “Monk’s Mood.” The one zig-zagging and changing speed, the other lyrical and serene.

And from Dizzy Gillespie and a special guest, one mystery surprise.

[To keep to the five-minute premise, you must listen to only 37.5 seconds of each recording. But feel free to take more time.]

Winter ahead

“If we treat this winter as normal, it will be anything but”: “Warning Signs About the First Post-pandemic Winter” (The Atlantic).

“Official activity”

A commission for “the inquiry into the condition of the native population in all its branches” has worked “with an unusual speed and energy” inspired by Aleksey Alexandrovich Karnenin.


Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova (New York: Modern Library, 2000).

Also from this novel
“The turning point of summer” : Theory of dairy farming : Toothache : Anna meta : “Brainless beef!” : “He could not help observing this”

Prisoners of Google

From the “Online Shopping” episode of the podcast You’re Wrong About, an exchange between Amanda Mull and host Sarah Marshall:

AM: Google is at this point like basically a utility.

SM: I don’t know how you could live without it, honestly.

Oh gosh. You could use DuckDuckGo and resort to a Google service (say, Google Books) only when absolutely necessary. No one need be a prisoner of Google.

[But yes, Blogger is a Google service. What did I know?]

Coffee vs. tea

Which beverage will claim the world title for healthiest drink? (The Washington Post).

Related reading
All OCA coffee and tea posts (Pinboard)

Back at it

I attended a concert this past weekend, my first since March 7, 2020. Elaine was in the orchestra; I was up in the balcony. The program was short. The highlight was Brahms’s Symphony No. 1. If, like me, you’ve never heard it, I would enthusiastically recommend listening.

The strange thing about being back in the hall after all this time: it felt, really, as if no time had passed. Elaine and I came up with this hypothesis: perhaps it’s when the place itself has changed that we most register time’s passing. Everything about the concert hall was the same. But in a store where we hadn’t shopped since March 2020, and which was remodeled in our absence: there we knew that time had passed. And that reminded me of when I entered a basement thrift store and realized that it had once been the club where I’d heard Son Seals, Koko Taylor, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

When I visited my Brooklyn elementary school in 1987 and 1998, the hallways and fixtures and staircases looked the same. The auditorium and gymnasium looked the same. The school basement even smelled the same. There too it was if no time had passed. I of course had changed since elementary schooldays — at least slightly. But walking through the hallways, I felt like my kid self, back in school, not like a stranger in a strange land.

For at least four years now, my elementary school has been covered in protective screening, with sidewalk sheds turning the pavements into dark tunnels. A sign from the NYC School Constrution Authority reads

Exterior Masonry
Flood Elimination
Roof Replacement
Parapets Replacement

I’m not sure what I’d feel if I were to revisit my school now.

[As I realized when I reread my earlier post, the P.S. 131 classrooms had changed. But their doors were locked, and I could only look through the windows. Perhaps that‘s why I remembered the things that hadn’t changed, the spaces I was able to enter.]

Electric Light Tie!

One more item from 306 Bowery. “Electric Bow Tie Co.”? I don’t think so. This novelty was no doubt offered by the Ace-Hy Sign Co.:

[Billboard, June 7, 1947. Click for a larger tie.]

I like that terse Time magazine phrasing: “Tie is good looking bow.”

Thanks, Brian.