Amusements

Steven Millhauser, “Paradise Park,” in The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

A lost sauce

[New York, February 15, 1971. Click for a larger view.]

I remember seeing Aunt Millie’s sauce in Brooklyn kidhood, on the shelf in Vinny & Rogers, the butcher shop where we bought our meat and poultry. When I went out on my own, I bought Aunt Millie’s out of deep nostalgia. Besides, it was a good sauce.

I was ready to scoff at this advertisement’s claim that Aunt Millie came in to check on the sauce, but there was indeed an Aunt Millie. Here’s a 1966 New York Times article about Carmella (Millie) and Salvatore Di Mauro, which makes clear that this 1983 commercial was reality-based. Salvatore died in 2006; Carmella in 2007. Heinz bought the Aunt Millie’s brand from Borden in 2001; by 2013 the brand was discontinued.

These days I make my own sauce, a long one (two-and-a-half to three hours) or a short one known as Coppola/“Godfather” sauce.

[Is that Zohra Lampert in the commercial? As for ortolan: I’m sorry I wondered.]

Astrud Gilberto (1940–2023)

Astrud Gilberto, who sang “The Girl from Ipanema” so memorably, has died at the age of eighty-three. The New York Times has an obituary. Here, from 1963, are the album version and the single, with João Gilberto, guitar, vocal; Stan Getz, tenor; Antonio Carlos Jobim, piano; Tommy Williams, bass; and Milton Banana, drums. Also, a TV version, with Gary Burton on vibes. And a movie version, also with Burton. Music by Jobim, Portuguese lyrics by Vinícius de Moraes, English lyrics by Norman Gimbel.

When I was teaching, I always loved having the opportunity to expose students to necessary (imho) cultural stuff. Works of lit, obviously, but also movies and music. You’ve never seen Citizen Kane? You’ve never heard Bessie Smith? You’ve come to the right place. I sometimes took the opportunity to play “The Girl from Ipanema” when teaching Odyssey 13, the episode in which Odysseus sees the princess Nausicaa frolicking on the beach with her maids. I played the album version, with no introduction, for greater mystery and, when the English lyrics kicked in, greater amusement.

[Bessie Smith: as in “Bessie, bop, or Bach,” in Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B.” It’d be a terrible thing to read the poem without hearing all three.]

A new Nancy book

[Click for a larger view.]

A new book from Olivia Jaimes: Nancy Wins at Friendship (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2023). Mostly 2020 Nancy strips.

Olivia Jaimes is a brilliant successor to Ernie Bushmiller. The Family Ritz and friends are in good hands.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Two kinds of people

“There are two kinds of people in the world”: Bruce Springsteen explains why he cannot agree to an interview about the Fender Stratocaster (Letters of Note). Wonderful stuff.

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All OCA guitar posts (Pinboard)

[Me, acoustic guitars only, thank you.]

ATTN: Tim Cook

My surroundings already are “an infinite canvas.” I suspect that yours are too.

[I don’t discount the possible usefulness of a headset for people with vision troubles. But reality itself is already an infinite canvas.]

“White ladders”

A walk in the dark yields “a night of revelations.”

Steven Millhauser, “Clair de Lune,” in The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

“NEVER CLOSED” Now with a link to an application to the National Register of Historic Places that teems with diner history.

“NEVER CLOSED”

[Munson Diner, 200 11th Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

From Michael Engle and Marlo Monti’s Diners of New York (Stackpole Books: Mechanicsburg, PA, 2008):

In 1921, Harry Zelin (born Samuel Zelinsky in Poland, in 1893) and his partner, Irving Greenman, rented space at 106 East 14th Street in Manhattan under the name Munson Lunch Company and started a quick lunch restaurant. After twenty-one years, Zelin opened his first restaurant at Greenwich and West Houston Streets, in the old Union Freight Terminal. In 1944, Zelin, under the name Delano Realty, acquired an existing old-style diner built in 1930 on the southwest corner of 49th Street and 11th Avenue. The following year he opened the Munson Diner, a new Kullman model with streamlined stainless steel and blue porcelain enamel flutes. He gradually added other diners and, by 1959, had at least five, including four on 11th Avenue: at 24th, 37th, 42nd Streets, and the aforementioned Munson Diner at 49th Street. Under the Delano Realty moniker, he brought a 1958 Silk City diner to 375 West Street, which was recently the Rib Restaurant, a now-closed barbecue joint.

The first restaurant: 588 Greenwich Street.

The older diner at the southwest corner of 49th and 11th: 681 11th Avenue.

The diner at the corner of 37th and 11th: 456-458 11th Avenue.

There’s no tax photograph for a 42nd and 11th location.

Diners ran in the Zelin and Greenman families: other family members owned three Market Diners and the Empire Diner. Here’s an elegy for the Market Diner at 43rd and 11th. Still going at 210 10th Avenue (under different ownership) is the Empire Diner. A tad upscale, no?

The Kullman diner at 681 11th (which replaced the diner in the photograph) is now in the Catskills, in Liberty, New York, living on as the New Munson Diner. Google Maps has it in its new location.

*

A reader passed on a link to an application to place the relocated Munson Diner in the National Register of Historic Places. The application’s thirty-seven pages are teeming with the history of that diner and of diners generally. Thanks, reader.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

“Bagels against th’ current”

In today’s Zippy, Dingburg seniors remember “th’ seventies,” when there was only one kind of bagel:

[Zippy, June 3, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

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All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[In truth, there have always been onion bagels. Black-and-white too, I think. Martinizing is a Zippy preoccupation. For instance.]