Fleece

[“Machine-Washable.” Zippy, January 11, 2023.
Clickfor a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy makes a point about fabrics.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Typed while wearing a Lands’ End fleece quarter-zip pullover, dark charcoal heather. And pants.]

Chrome: reduce RAM and CPU usage

I prefer not to use Chrome. But if you use it, you should know how to reduce its RAM and CPU usage with Memory Saver mode.

[From OSXDaily, but the fix works for Windows too.]

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

The Secret of Convict Lake (dir. Michael Gordon, 1951). It’s 1871 in California, and five escaped convicts have secured food and shelter in a small settlement whose menfolk have all gone off in search of silver, leaving the women home alone. One convict has a secret purpose whose implications become clear as the story develops. Glenn Ford, Gene Tierney, Ethel Barrymore, and Zachary Scott star in a movie that mixes charity, lust, matriarchy, Stockholm syndrome, and some pretty rough justice. From the Criterion Channel’s Snow Westerns feature. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Square Jungle (dir. Jerry Hopper, 1955). A grocery clerk (Tony Curtis) in need of cash to bail out his alcoholic father (Jim Backus) enters an amateur boxing contest and is soon on his way to a world championship. Ernest Borgnine and Paul Kelly provide good support as a trainer and a cop investing in the new fighter’s career. Curtis emotes and then emotes some more. This movie wants to have it both ways: fighting is a brutal business, but here’s Joe Louis waving to the crowd, and here’s some wisdom from the Talmud, so everything’s okay after all. ★★ (YT)

*

Top Ten Monks (dir. Dana Heinz Perry, 2010). A short documentary about the Cistercian monks of Austria’s Stift Heiligenkreuz Abbey, whose recordings of Gregorian chant achieved great success on European pop charts. In thirty-seven minutes we get a clearer picture of a monastic routine and of the lives and motivations of individual monks than in the nearly three-hour-long Into Great Silence (2005). But there’s little said about the business of it all — about what happens when sacred music (a form of prayer, one monk explains) becomes a relaxant for motorists caught in traffic jams. The most arresting scene: a young monk talking to spellbound visitors, in a church so cold that everyone’s breath is visible. ★★★ (HBO)

*

Emily the Criminal (dir. John Patton Ford, 2022). Emily (Aubrey Plaza), a painter manqué beset by a criminal record and massive college debt, takes up a life of credit-card fraud in Los Angeles. When her mentor Youcef (Theo Rossi) becomes her lover, angry words fly between Youcef and his cousin-in-crime Khalil (Jonathan Avigdori). A bit formulaic, but genuinely suspenseful, with a great performance by Plaza (who nails a New Jersey way of talking). As the movie neared its end, it was impossible to know which way the story might go. ★★★★ (N)

*

Cry Vengeance (dir. Mark Stevens, 1954). Stevens stars as a former cop, just released from prison and headed to Alaska, seeking vengeance against the mobster who framed him and killed his wife and daughter. That’s the simple version: the real plot is bewilderingly out of proportion to the movie’s eighty-three minutes. Some good scenes in an insular, dumpy Alaskan town accessible only by seaplane. The standout in the cast is Skip Homeier as Roxey, a bizarro (bleached?) blond killer. ★★ (YT)

[Uh-oh.]

*

Twelve Hours to Kill (dir. Edward L. Cahn, 1960). A Greek engineer (Nico Minardos) working in the United States witnesses a gangland murder and is soon under police protection — or is he? Barbara Eden plays the role of a much more reliable protector. Gavin MacLeod and Richard Reeves are thugs, Dig the drugstore scenes (how late does that place stay open?), and watch for Ted Knight in a small role. ★★★ (YT)

*

Forbidden Passage (dir. Fred Zinneman, 1941). From the Crime Does Not Pay series, by a distinguished director whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust. The message: tell family members in Europe to stay there and not try to enter the United States illegally. The message is brought home with scenes of chilling brutality: when smugglers are about to be found out, they bind their passengers, place them in burlap bags, and weigh them down with chains before dropping them into the water. After watching Ken Burns’s The U.S. and the Holocaust, it’s impossible to think about this short movie without intense cognitive dissonance. ★ (TCM)

*

A Christmas Carol (dir. Edwin L. Marin, 1938). It flew by, and no wonder — it’s only sixty-nine minutes, and was, says June Lockhart, who appears as a Cratchit daughter, a B movie. Warmhearted and goofy, with the darker elements of the Dickens story removed. As Scrooge, Reginald Owen is more comic curmudgeon than mean miser; as Bob Cratchit, Gene Lockhart is a bit too happy and energetic. Seeing this movie for the first time, I now realize that Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962) found much of its inspiration herein — even the gentlemen soliciting for charitable contributions look the same. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Dance Craze (dir. Joe Massot, 1981). All singing, all dancing! A documentary of the British 2 Tone scene, with performances by Bad Manners, the (English) Beat, The Bodysnatchers, Madness, The Selecter, and The Specials. The sound and image are murky, the musicianship is not always polished — the Beat and the Specials are by far the most accomplished players — but the energy and enthusiasm make for a joyful noise indeed. Impossible to sit still. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Meshes of the Afternoon (dir. Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943). It’s no. 16 on the Sight & Sound 100-best list, right below The Searchers. I don’t know what to make of such attempts to rank. Meshes is a short black-and-white silent, made of variations on a theme: a woman enters a house, finds objects, ascends a staircase, chases a hooded figure. I hesitate to buy into explanations of what it means: I’ll settle instead for recognizing its dream-like narrative, which makes, say, the dream sequence of Spellbound risible by comparison. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Wanda (dir. Barbara Loden, 1970). Also from the Sight & Sound list (tied for no. 48), it’s the only movie Barbara Loden directed, the story of Wanda (Loden), a woman from coal country who leaves her husband and children, takes to the road, and takes up with the first man whose path she crosses, “Mr. Dennis” (Michael Higgins), a wildly inept and hypercritical robber. Wanda is a cipher, a meek would-be outlaw. I thought again and again of Dickinson’s 764:

My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —
In Corners — till a Day
The Owner passed — identified —
And carried Me away —

Like the speaker of Dickinson’s poem, Wanda serves a patriarchal master; she is inert until acted upon. ★★★★ (CC)

*
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (dir. Roy Rowland, 1945). Further proof of Edward G. Robinson’s versatility: here he’s Martinius Jacobson, a Wisconsin dairy farmer, married to the dour Bruna (Agnes Moorehead), and devoted to his daughter Selma (Margaret O’Brien). I’m reminded of Our Town: this movie, too, looks at the life in a community of private joys, private sorrows, and a moment of collective foreboding that I was pretty sure would show up. The one weak point: Jackie “Butch” Jenkins (as Selma’s young friend Arnold). The movie’s trailer makes clear that his presence was considered a selling point for the film, but I say the kid should have been exiled to a Norman Rockwell painting. ★★★★ (YT)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Cult of Mac top 2022 apps

Cult of Mac names its top apps of 2022 — eight in all, four of them free. I use just one of them, NetNewsWire, which is free and terrific.

[Craft looks spiffy, but it seems better suited to group work than solo effort. When I couldn’t figure out how to copy and paste a URL to make a link — just a link, nothing more — I decided to stick with Byword and iA Writer.]

Pocket notebook sighting

From What Happened Was . . . (dir. Tom Noonan, 1994). Co-workers Jackie (Karen Sillas) and Michael (Tom Noonan) are having dinner at Jackie’s place. It may or may not be a first date. Jackie notices that Michael is making notes now and then. Is he writing a book?

[Click any image for a larger view.]

No, he says. “It’s just . . . it’s notes.”

What Happened Was . . . is streaming at the Criterion Channel.

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 : Lost Horizon : 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

Wrinkles

We were turning the pages of an (unsolicited) catalogue this weekend when we started laughing, because we realized that every item of clothing in the catalogue was wrinkled. That must be what they mean by Effortlessly Cool®. We imagined that when one places an order, someone picks the clothes up from the floor, rolls them into a ball, and drops them into an paper bag. Way cool.

I used the Mac app Acorn to effortlessly assemble some fabric samples.


Living in downstate Illinois, we know how to make our own fun.

No pictures

This story has made it to The New York Times: “A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job.” It’s a perfect example of administrative overreaction fueled by fear and ignorance.

I sometimes think about works I taught as a professor of English and wonder whether I’d choose to teach them now. Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood ? Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man ? Gilbert Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight ? Or, say, almost anything by Ovid?

My syllabi for lit classes in my closing years of teaching had a brief disclaimer: “The works we’re reading contain material that some readers may find offensive or disturbing (language, sex, violence).” With Aberration of Starlight I’d note a handful of pages that some students might prefer to skip, adding, in a comic spirit, that some students might want to turn immediately to those pages. I doubt that my relatively casual attitude would work today.

*

January 17: Recent developments, as reported by Inside Higher Ed: statements from the president, a former president, and the board of trustees of Hamline University; statements of support for the fired instructor from art historians, PEN America, and Muslim organizations.

And later the same day, as reported by The New York Times: the instructor has filed a lawsuit, and university officials now say that their use of the word “Islamophobic” was “flawed.”

*

April 4: Fayneese Miller, the president of Hamline University, will retire in June.

“Older”

I liked this detail from Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s address to the House yesterday, as he moved through a catalogue of American lives: “We are young. We are older.” “Older” — not “old.”

You can watch at C-SPAN. The catalogue of lives begins at 9:14. And an alphabetical catalogue of Democratic values begins at 13:23. It’s quite something.

A related post
“Older person”

On Arthur Avenue

Still in the Bronx this Sunday, on Arthur Avenue, famed street of Italian-American culture. That’s the street where Marty Piletti had his butcher shop.

[2390 Arthur Avenue, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

This is another one of those photographs that have everything. Here everything means women in hats (a mother–daughter pair?), two women in aprons, a man with a cap, a window full of . . . cans of olive oil maybe?, a mystery storefront with . . . fabrics on display?, sawhorses, a sidewalk entrance to a cellar, a tough customer with a tie, improbable watering cans, and a baby carriage. And if you look closely, a bonus, right above 3073 – 43 BX (the block and lot identification).

Today no. 2390 is the M & G Restaurant. The fire escape appears to be as it was when the tax photo was taken.

Related reading
Buono’s Groc., another photograph with everything : More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

Domestic comedy

“We haven’t turned the TV on all day. What a loss.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)