A noir beginning

[Two O’Clock Courage (dir. Anthony Mann, 1945). Click for a larger view.]

Ted “Step” Allison (Tom Conway) staggers away from the camera as the movie begins. It’s a good not great noir. I gave it three stars.

The cinematographer: Jack MacKenzie, whose first screen credit was in 1916 and whose last was in 1963 — on Leave It to Beaver.

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A reader noticed the similarity to the opening credits for Mad Men:


Coincidence? Perhaps. But gosh is the composition similar. If it’s not a matter of coincidence, the similarity is certainly not meant to be recognized. Two O’Clock Courage is not a well-known movie.

Siri and Calendar

For iPhone users: did you know that you can use Siri to add events to Calendar? Here’s an official Apple page that explains. I discovered this possibility on my own by saying “Add to calendar” to see what would happen.

If you find, as I do, that adding an event to Calendar by hand, on the spot, is incredibly tedious, voice is a welcome alternative.

[I am still an analog kind of guy — with a pocket Moleskine planner — but I like the redundancy of having events on the phone.]

Mack McCormick’s Monster

Blues news from The Washington Post : the Smithsonian is revealing more materials from Mack McCormick’s archive of recordings and writings, aka “The Monster.”

Related posts
Icicles, shrimp, and tamales : Mack McCormick’s Robert Johnsons

James Baldwin’s outlines and doodles

From Jillian Hess’s Noted, a Substack devoted to notebooks and note-taking: James Baldwin’s outlines and doodles.

Related reading
Some OCA James Baldwin posts (Pinboard)

A hate crime in Illinois

The news I woke up to: in a Chicago suburb, a seventy-one-year-old man killed a six-year-old boy and wounded the boy’s mother because they were Muslim.

5 Patchin Place

[5 Patchin Place, West Village, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Last Sunday I posted the tax photograph of 154 W. 10th Street, home to Three Lives & Company and, in the past, Djuna Books. Which leads me today to 5 Patchin Place, long the home of the writer Djuna Barnes. The street is one with considerable history. No. 5 is to the right of the stone fireplace in the photograph above.

From Phillip Herring’s Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (1995):

Back in New York, the happiest news of these years in Djuna’s life was that she found an apartment, upstairs at 5 Patchin Place, a private court with iron gate (usually open) near Greenwich Avenue and Tenth Street. Patchin Place, a picturesque reminder of what Greenwich Village once had been, contained fifty flats in two rows, built in 1848 as boardinghouses for the Basque waiters at the old Breevort Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Many famous writers and intellectuals had dwelled in the short cul-de-sac, including John Reed, Theodore Dreiser, Padraic Colum, and Jane Bowles. E.E. Cummings lived across the way from Djuna, downstairs at number 4.

Barnes moved to no. 5 in September 1940. Her rent: $40 a month. Aside from a brief stay in a nursing home, she stayed on Patchin Place, largely a recluse, through numerous and varied adversities, for the rest of her life. Herring tells a well-known story:

In 1952, [Barnes] fell and broke her shoulder. She crawled to her telephone and called on her neighbor E.E. Cummings, who climbed the fire escape, let himself in, and telephoned for the ambulance that took her to the French Hospital. Thereafter he would occasionally raise his window and shout, “Are you still alive, Djuna?” She outlasted Cummings by twenty years.

From Andew Field’s Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes (1983):

In 1963 a developer purchased Patchin Place for $630,000 and said that, if the tenants would not permit him a reasonable return on his investment, then he would be forced to rip down the old buildings and erect a multi-storey on the site. There was a tenants’ protest meeting (reported in The New York Times, September 30, 1963: “Patchin and Milligan Tenants Unite to Preserve Quiet Corner”). Miss Barnes spoke at the meeting and said that she would die if she was forced to move uptown. More than that, the neighbourhood needed to be preserved as it was so that the young people had a suitable place to practice their mugging. The landlord backed away, and life continued on for her as before in small, difficult days.

Barnes’s rent in 1963: $49.50 a month.

[From the Times article, for which Barnes consented to an interview. The article does not mention a Barnes appearance at a protest meeting. Click for a larger view.]

Djuna Barnes died in her apartment on June 18, 1982, days after her ninetieth birthday.

Here’s more about 5 Patchin Place, from Ephemeral New York and the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. Here’s a famous photograph of Barnes standing inside the Patchin Place gate. And here are Trulia’s real-estate photographs of the apartment’s interior, all 500 square feet of it. The apartment is off the market.

I’m no Barnes expert, but I can highly recommend the novel Nightwood (1936), which I dared to teach several times. It’s a great modernist novel, a great modern novel, and a great novel.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : “Smith going backward” (A phrase from Djuna Barnes)

“But” speaks

Alexandra Petri, writing in The Washington Post (gift link): “The word ‘But’ asks that it not appear in these sentences.” The words “Nevertheless,” “Still,” and “However” concur.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Lars G. Doubleday, aka Doug Peterson and Brad Wilber. Their last Stumper was in January of this year. Today’s puzzle is another solid Stumper. The cross that began to reveal the puzzle to me: 24-D, letters, “It’s covered for strollers” and 32-A, six letters, “Bardic king.” I’m surprised that I got 24-D first. I just thought has to be.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

4-D, seven letters, “Always-open merchant.” A better clue might be “An answer that needs to be banned from crosswords.” I can’t stand the word.

8-A, seven letters, “Clogs, for example.” An example of this puzzle’s ambiguities.

17-A, seven letters, “Less likely to split.” C’mon, man. The answer appears nowhere in the OED and it barely registers in the Google Ngram Viewer.

20-D, nine letters, “Literally, ‘Children of the Covenant.’” I learned something.

27-A, four letters, “About ninety-one yards of a football field.” A novel way to clue a familiar word.

43-D, seven letters, “Genre of graphic novels.” Oh! Cool.

44-A, nine letters, “Quartet in Mississippi.” As much as I like the answer, I think the clue is fiendishly arbitrary.

47-D, six letters, “Local.” Unexpected.

55-A, twelve letters, “Resumption after an interruption.” Nicely colloquial.

68-A, seven letters, “Back down?” Oof.

My favorite in this puzzle: 10-D, four letters, “‘Congratulations!’ message source, maybe.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Zippy, re: Nancy

[“Over the Counter.” Zippy, October 13, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

This diner diner, who still reads the newspaper and still reads the comics first, is channeling Bill Griffith. In his talk about Ernie Bushmiller and Nancy at The New School this past Tuesday, Griffith made that point about newspaper-reading (with the front page added), and he offered this diner’s observation about Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy — that it treats Nancy and Sluggo as if they are teenagers. He also mentioned the new strip’s emphasis on computers and social media. He’s not a fan.

In the final panel of today’s strip, this diner might be speaking only for himself: “Today’s Marmaduke is pretty funny.” (Marmaduke is now in re-runs.)

Me, I love Bushmiller’s Nancy, and I think Olivia Jaimes’s version is often wonderful. I tire though of robotics, the magnet school, and dialogues and monologues that end in self-contradiction. But when Jaimes is deploying visual humor, as in today’s strip, her Nancy is a delight.

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Later that same morning: Bill Griffith’s talk is available on YouTube. He comments on Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy at 1:34 (“I’m not happy with it”) and on newspaper reading at 1:56:23.

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Frasier again

Our household signed on for a free month of Paramount+ to sample the new Frasier. We watched the two available episodes last night and deleted our account.

There are many things to say about the new Frasier. I’ll offer just one: Paramount+ has made a series that might appeal to fans of Cheers. I’m not sure how it’s supposed to appeal to fans of Frasier.