Another imaginary radio show: Blanket Statements, the show about blankets and the people who sleep with them:
“After the break, we’ll be talking about plaid. Is it really warmer?”Yes, plaid is really warmer, In blankets and in everything else.
[“Vaudeville on Island: Keith Artists to Give Thanksgiving Program on Blackwell’s.” The New York Times, November 30, 1922.]
Yes, November 30: the next-to-last Thursday of the month wouldn’t become Thanksgiving Day until 1939.
It’s not clear what population these vaudevillians were entertaining: at various times asylum, hospital, and prison populations were all housed on Blackwell’s Island, or Welfare Island, as it had already been renamed in 1921. Given a Times report on Thanksgiving 1914 at Blackwell’s, I suspect that the audience was a prison population.
I recognize two of the names here: Eddie Foy, whom I know only as a name, and “Demarest,” as in William Demarest, Uncle Charley from My Three Sons, who perfomed in vaudeville with his wife Estelle Collette (real name Esther Zychlin).
On this same Thanksgiving, the great tenor Beniamino Gigli sang at Sing Sing. The inmates had already been visited by vaudevillians on November 26th. From the Times: “Sing Sing has not had a grand opera entertainment since the San Carlo Opera Company was there a year ago” (“Grand Opera for Convicts at Sing Sing Thanksgiving,” November 27, 1922.)
And if you’ve never heard Gigli, here’s “M’apparì” (1923). And another rendition, thirty years later.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
Related Thanksgiving posts
Blackwell’s Island, 1914 : Sing Sing, 1907 : Sing Sing, 1908
Oxford Languages is asking the public to vote for a word of the year. The choices, which for some reason Oxford lists out of alphabetical order: metaverse, #IStandWith, and goblin mode. Vote here.
My choice for word of the year: angst. As in a Ted Berrigan poem from A Certain Slant of Sunlight (Oakland, CA: O Books, 1988):
AngstMe too. “The news” is a nightmare.
I had angst.
From The Chicago Manual of Style blog Shop Talk, an explanation of when to capitalize an initial the.
[Should it be the Left Banke or The Left Banke? I go back and forth. Uh-oh, a nitpicker. Just walk away, Renée.]
Lydia Ricci: “tiny sculptures made from the scraps of daily existence.” There are also animations. And an Instagram page.
Found via Daughter Number Three.
[Lydia Ricci’s art marks the second time in two days I’ve seen a depiction of an old-school cassette recorder with a red Record button. The first time: in an episode of Arthur.]
Porfiry Petrovich (no family name) is the principal investigator of a double murder. He is speaking to Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov:
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, translated by Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 2021).
At the 278-page mark, this novel just became interesting in a new way. Elaine and I, independent of each another, each wrote Columbo in our margins. So I’m happy to see that Lieutenant Columbo’s creators, Richard Levinson and William Link, named Porfiry Petrovich as a model for their character. Some years back, I thought that the little detective in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques had something to do with the character of Columbo. And I still think that Dickens’s Inspector Bucket, with his invisible wife and missing first name, is in there somewhere.
Two related posts
Columbo’s notebook : Separated at birth: Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, William Hopper
[Re Columbo’s first name, see here.]
“Nearly imperceptible delays in soloists’ timing contribute to the music’s signature rhythm”: from Science News, a claim about where jazz gets its swing.
Try listening to the two music samples therein (fifty-two seconds of the Duke Jordan composition “Jordu”). I have to admit that I hear no difference between them. The study described in the article includes a an online gizmo that allows the user to try different “swing ratios” with a six-second sample of “Jordu.”
A more satisfying musical experience: hearing Duke Jordan himself play “Jordu.”
Thanks, Frank.
Related reading
All OCA jazz posts (Pinboard)
