“Scratches, indentations, scrolls”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: HarperCollins, 1974).

Related reading
All OCA Calvino posts (Pinboard)

The British Library was hacked

“How ironic that the most quaintly analog form of research possible, using physical books in a physical library, has been devastated by the hijacking of a digital system”: Carolyn Dever tells the story of the Halloween ransomware attack of the British Library. More at the British Library’s website.

[Small world: I just read about “Michael Field” in Sarah Ogilvie’s The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary.]

Jeffrey Foskett (1956–2023)

“A singer-guitarist that spent decades in the Beach Boys and played a pivotal role in Brian Wilson’s late Nineties comeback thanks to his soaring falsetto and effortless ability to harmonize”: from a Rolling Stone obituary.

Jeffrey Foskett was a man for all seasons, and a key figure among the musicians who brought Brian Wilson back from, well, the wasteland. I was fortunate to see him performing with Brian on the first Pet Sounds and SMiLE tours. Jeffrey Foskett’s death is a great loss to music.

Tár pencils: Blackwings

[Tár (dir. Todd Field, 2022). Click for a much larger view.]

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) has quite a stash of Blackwing pencils — no doubt to suggest a tie to her teacher Leonard Bernstein, another Blackwing user. Yes, Tár was his student: the Bernstein estate has confirmed it.

If you click to see the screenshot at full size, you’ll see Eberhard Faber Blackwings on the left, followed by Palomino Blackwings, followed by more boxes of Eberhard Faber pencils. I like seing that Tár chooses an Eberhard Faber Blackwing to sharpen. She’s using the real thing first.

I have nothing against resurrecting a brand name, but I have an admitted animus against the company that makes the Palomino Blackwing, whose business practices I find ethically dubious. See, for instance, these two posts: Duke Ellington, Blackwing pencils, and aspirational branding and The Palomino Blackwing pencil and truth in advertising. And from Sean Malone, the Blackwing’s own historian, Facts, fiction, and the Blackwing experience.

Related reading
All OCA Blackwing posts (Pinboard)

A Tár pencil: Caran d’Ache

[From Tár (dir. Todd Field, 2022). Click for a much larger view.]

That’s a Pablo colored pencil from Caran d’Ache. The 120-pencil set is a mere $530 (VAT).

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Some Automats

[155 W. 33rd Street, 250 W. 42nd Street, 611 W. 181st Street, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much, much, much larger view.]

There are thirty-eight Horn and Hardart Automats in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory. This has been some of them.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[“There are thirty-eight”: I’m channeling The Naked City and Naked City. There were also eighteen Horn and Hardart retail outlets in Manhattan, one Automat and two retail outlets in Brooklyn, eight retail outlets in the Bronx, and “some” (three) retail outlets in Queens.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Lester Ruff (puzzle editor Stan Newman), and, yes, it is Less Rough. I started with 8-A, seven letters, “Shakespearean general” and 14-D, seven letters, “Why some risks are taken,” and then word after word fell into place. The one tricky spot: the southwest corner, where an unfamiliar answer, a tricky clue, and a piece of sports trivia had me stumped for a bit.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, seven letters, “Surname shared by different Best Actor Oscar winners.” I immediately thought HEPBURN. But no, the clue asks for Best Actor.

15-A, seven letters, “Step-by-step guide.” I was thinking too literally — of, say, IKEA instructions. (Shudder.)

28-D, five letters, “Word before clerk or company.” Been there, done that, at least the clerk part. And the non-clerk in me says there should be two pairs of italics or quotation marks in that clue.

38-A, eight letters, “Pulley with teeth.” Difficult for me to visualize, perhaps because I’ve never noticed one.

38-D, seven letters, “It’s handled in the kitchen.” The answer is unfamiliar to me, though I concede that the thing is handled in the kitchen.

39-D, seven letters, “Plain.” Tricky.

40-D, seven letters, “Big Ten team as of 2014.” There’s the sports trivia. (Could this puzzle be a rerun?)

53-A, four letters, “Feet, so to speak.” This answer needs to be brought back into everyday speech.

62-A, seven letters, “It puts the ‘high’ in highway.” All I could think of at first was an overpass.

64-A, seven letters, “Fit nicely.” A cozy answer.

My favorite in this puzzle: 59-D, three letters, “It’s about as old as the club.” (AXE?!)

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Current events

Orange Crate Art began as a way for me to collect items of interest for my teaching, as such items began to turn up online more often than in print. But early on, OCA became about whatever I wanted it to be about. Which often makes it difficult to know what to do with current events.

I am thinking of every post right now as a flight from current events. Those events are always on my mind. I am appalled by the killing of innocent people in Israel and Gaza. I am appalled by barbarism and terrorism, whatever the cause. I am appalled by religious hatred and xenophobia and the mindless chanting of slogans. I am appalled by the indiscriminate use of force, as Simone Weil defined it: “it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.”

But I have no special insight into current events. Other people do, and it’s for them to speak and write about them.

Waiting for Bob Dylan

I was walking down the block of my childhood, 44th Street between New Utrecht and 12th, in Boro Park, Brooklyn. Such traffic: cars were backed up in the wrong direction all down the one-way street. They must have changed the traffic pattern since my childhood.

I saw the guy to whom Elaine and I had given a can of Fix-a-Flat the other day. He and his nephew had been in a university paking lot, trying to roll a car with a dead battery and flat tire onto a trailer. We helped push — no use — and invited the uncle to walk back to our house with us (a five-minute walk) so we could give him the can. Now he was waiting in this line of idling cars to meet and get an autograph from Bob Dylan.

I saw the uncle again, but now his car was further back, at the end of the block, as if the line in front of him had lengthened. I was in my car, parked alongside him. “When you move forward, I’ll pull in,” I said. And some time later, I was at the head of the line outside Bob Dylan’s hotel room.

The room was small and windowless, lit by a table lamp. Dylan was lying on a bed, head on a pillow, playing an acoustic guitar. Alongside him, at a 45-degree angle, in a long red robe, was a woman scatting an old standard, maybe “Indiana,” maybe “Pennies from Heaven,” maybe “Whispering.” Dylan was playing an astonishingly good accompaniment, with all sorts of complex substitute chords. I was, as I said to myself, “agape and aghast” and began recording on my phone. Then I decided I didn’t want any of this on my phone, so I stopped.

When the song was done, Dylan rose from the bed and walked out of the room and past the line of people. He was taking a break. “Hi Bob,” someone said. He didn’t acknowledge them. I realized that I had had a question to ask, but now I couldn’t remember it. And I had left in the car the album I was going to ask him to sign. I didn’t think there was time to walk back and get it.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[The Fix-a-Flat is from waking life. No idea where Dylan came from. “Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). Here is “Bob Dylan’s Dream.”]

Exceedingly strange

The Strangest Toy on Wish Lists This Year“” (The New York Times, gift link).