A cognitive test to be president

At The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri offers a cognitive test to be president (gift link). It begins:

1. What year is it?

2. What country do you live in?

3. Is that country a democracy or a dictatorship?

And it gets better.

Iris Apfel (1921–2024)

“A New York society matron and interior designer who late in life knocked the socks off the fashion world with a brash bohemian style that mixed hippie vintage and haute couture, found treasures in flea markets and reveled in contradictions”: from the New York Times obituary for Iris Apfel (gift link).

Elaine and I have two degrees of separation from Iris Apfel: in 1984 and 1985 our great friend Aldo Carrasco worked at Old World Weavers, the textile company Iris and Carl Apfel founded in 1950. Aldo was in charge of correspondence with European companies, conducted by telex. He sent us fabric ends, and once in a while he sent a telex to Elaine at her workplace. Here is proof, though this telex came in the mail.

A related post
A brief review of the documentary Iris

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Stella Zawistowski is known for tough puzzles, but her Newsday Saturday Stumpers are often relatively easy. Today’s Stumper is her first since last October, and I found it easy indeed — under nineteen minutes from start to finish. I began with one lucky guess and one giveaway: 34-A, nine letters, “It’s about an hour’s drive from Oberlin” and 41-A, eight letters, “NATO headquarters.” And whole swaths of the puzzle began to fall into place.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, ten letters, “What many tourists hope to take in.” At least if they’re wise tourists.

5-D, six letters, “Party leaders.” Bye, Ronna.

8-D, three letters, “Cement user’s designation.” I thought at first that the answer had to do with some system for grading varieties of cement.

9-D, twelve letters, “Urban asset.” I recall one or two moments when having 9-D came in handy.

18-A, ten letters, “Loopy pastime.” I am delighted to know that you can be six and be great at it.

21-D, twelve letters, “Breakfast serving.” Not in my house. No way.

32-D, four letters, “Dull finish.” Uh, MATT?

33-A, five letters, “Something to run for.” See what a nice puzzle this is?

40-A, five letters, “They'll give you a hand.” Even when this puzzle is being tricky, it’s kind.

42-D, six letters, “Sleeps in emperor tents, say.” I knew what the answer had to be, but now I need to find out what an emperor tent is.

61-A, four letters, “Torts taker.” Clever.

My favorite in this puzzle: 44-A, three letters, “Iceberg’s destination, sometimes.” Nicely witty.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

*

SZ also created today’s Los Angeles Times crossword, which I do at The Washington Post. It’s less difficult than today’s Stumper — for me, about three minutes less difficult.

A missing painting

What’s wrong with this paragraph?

Over the next hour and a half, the thieves stole more than a dozen works of art, including pieces by Edgar Degas, Rembrandt van Rijn, Édouard Manet and Peter Paul Rubens, cutting the works from their ornate wooden frames. They also took an ancient Chinese beaker and a bronze eagle finial from a Napoleonic-era flagpole.

It’s from a New York Times obituary for Richard Abath, a night watchman at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum when the heist took place. What neither this paragraph nor the rest of the obituary mentions is that the “more than a dozen works of art” stolen included The Concert, one of only thirty-four known paintings by Johannes Vermeer.

Later today:

Over the next hour and a half, the thieves stole more than a dozen works of art, including pieces by Edgar Degas, Rembrandt van Rijn, Édouard Manet, Peter Paul Rubens and Johannes Vermeer, cutting the works from their ornate wooden frames. They also took an ancient Chinese beaker and a bronze eagle finial from a Napoleonic-era flagpole.

Ticonderoga sightings

[Robert Foulk as a police captain, John Harding as Dean Harvey Rockwell. From The Impossible Years (dir. Michael Gordon, 1968). Click either image for a larger view.]

The Establishment types in this dreadful movie had good pencils. If you click either screenshot for a larger image, you’ll see the distinctive Dixon Ticonderoga ferrule. By their ferrules ye shall know them.

Related reading
All OCA Dixon Ticonderoga posts (Pinboard)

[For Lassie fans only: Robert Foulk was Sheriff Milller.]

Logo change

From the BBC: the world’s oldest logo, a dead lion surrounded by bees, gets a redesign.

A few logo posts
American Bureau of Shipping : Bananastan, by Art Spiegelman : Cat’s Paw : Eberhard Faber’s Diamond Star : Funk & Wagnalls : IBEW logo : Red Rose Tea : Schwan’s and a rip-off

The Mississippi John Hurt Museum, gone

NPR reports that the Mississippi John Hurt Museum in Avalon, Mississippi, was destroyed in a fire last week. There’s more from Smithsonian magazine. And there’s already a fundraiser to create a new memorial to Hurt.

Thanks to Chris at Dreamers Rise for passing on the news.

Related reading
All OCA Mississippi John Hurt posts (Pinboard)

Twelve movies

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

Temptation (dir. Irving Pichel, 1946). Haute melodrama and Orientalism. Merle Oberon plays Ruby, a disreputable woman married to egyptologist Nigel Armine (George Brent). An affair with the dashing Mahoud Baroudi (Charles Korvin) makes for great danger for Ruby and her husband. Paul Lukas does well as a doctor and friend to Nigel, and it’s fun to see Charles Korvin (Carlos Sanchez, the mambo dancer in The Honeymooners) in another pre-TV role. ★★★ (YT)

*

Account Rendered (dir. Peter Graham Scott, 1957). Philandering Lucille Ainsworth (Ursula Howells) is found dead, and everyone’s a suspect: her husband, his banker, a would-be suitor, a painter, and a female friend. The movie’s strong point is its plotting: the details pointing to each person’s guilt are carefully chosen and made to count. The acting is sometimes weak, and the scenes between Howells and her painter-lover (John Van Eyssen) are unconvincing.But Honor Blackman shines as Lucille’s friend, a friend with a secret of her own. ★★★ (YT)

*

Manhandled (dir. Lewis R. Foster, 1949). A lurid title for a fine whodunit. Alan Napier (6′6″) is a “British author” who dreams of killing his philandering wife; Harold Vermilyea is the author’s tiny psychiatrist; Dorothy Lamour is the psychiatrist’s secretary; Dan Duryea is an one-man detective and collections agency and the secretary’s boyfriend; Art Smith is the police detective investigating the murder of the philandering wife; Sterling Hayden is an insurance man in search of the wife’s missing jewels. Tightly plotted, with plausible suspects, some clever camera work, and several surprises along the way. A bonus: the squalor of the Duryea apartment/office, with a hamster running on a wheel at all hours. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Immortal Story (dir. Orson Welles, 1968). In Macao, a wealthy merchant, Mr. Clay (Welles), seeks to make real a story he once heard of a wealthy old man who pays a sailor to impregnate the old man’s wife. So the merchant’s bookkeeper (Roger Coggio) is dispatched to find a cast, so to speak: the daughter (Jeanne Moreau) of Clay’s former business partner, and a Danish sailor (Norman Eshley). A surprisingly tender interlude in bed follows. With Clay seated, immobile, in a great chair, I take this short film (from a story by Isak Dinesen) to be an allegory of filmmaking: a director makes words into a picture. ★★★ (CC)

*

Across the Bridge (dir. Ken Annakin, 1957). “I want to tell you something: what you think is the end for me is often only the beginning”: so says Carl Schaffner (Rod Steiger) a German-born British businessman who flees the United States for Mexico after embezzling company funds and switches identities (don’t ask how) with another passenger on a train. But when Schaffner discovers whose passport he now carries, his troubles really begin. From a story by Graham Greene, this movie is a tour de force for Steiger,for a dog aptly named Dolores, and for the city of Lora del Rio, Spain, where the movie’s Mexico scenes were filmed. Is this movie as little known as I think it is? ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Impossible Years (dir. Michael Gordon, 1968). A truly, madly, deeply unfunny sex comedy. David Niven is Jonathan KIngsley, a professor of psychology with a teenaged daughter, Linda (Cristina Ferrare), whose wild behavior threatens his promotion (that behavior amounts to carrying a sign at a campus protest with “Free Speech” on one side and something on the other that we can only guess at, since no one will say it aloud). The movie is both prudish and prurient, with Linda’s virginity or lack thereof a preoccupation of her parents: Prof. Kingsley even checks his daughter’s status with her doctor, who’s played by Ozzie Nelson. As a document of a vanished white middle-American idea of comedy, it’s a valuable document (it was a box-office hit); as a movie, it’s dreadful. ★ (TCM)

*

The Soft Skin (dir. François Truffaut, 1964). An affair and its aftermath: Pierre Lachenay (Jean Desailly) is a public intellectual (writing books, editing a journal, lecturing in sold-out auditoriums), a married man having an affair with Nicole, a flight attendant (the ill-fated Françoise Dorléac). Pierre’s obsession with Nicole (haunting her airport), his professional obligations (dinners, meetings), his insistence on secrecy (this hotel, not that one), Nicole’s landlord, her concierge, her father: all impinge on the affair. And then there’s Pierre’s wife Franca (Nelly Benedetti). The movie maintains a nervous pace with quick cuts as it moves to a satisfying conclusion straight out of the movies. ★★★★ (CC)

[Google’s capsule description: “Heartfelt, sweet, and sentimental.” So much for artificial intelligence.]

*

Undercurrent (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1946). Dowdy Ann Hamilton (Katharine Hepburn), a scientist’s daughter, meets and marries dashing businessman and inventor Alan Garroway (Robert Taylor) and they live happily ever — no, only for a while. Because something’s not right: Alan’s sudden angers and odd lies spell trouble for this marriage. And that’s where Robert Mitchum comes in. A noirish gothic story with overtones of Jane Eyre and Rebecca, and great stuff even if you’re not a Katharine Hepburn fan. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Sky’s the Limit (dir. Edward H. Griffith, 1943). I’d call it a less Art Deco, less glamorous, more “American” vehicle for Fred Astaire, who plays a Flying Tiger pilot who appears to have done some singing and dancing. He meets and woos a newspaper photographer who also sings and dances (Joan Leslie), but he keeps his identity a secret, until — well, until. The musical numbers here (with songs by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer) are few, but they’re great, especially Astaire’s drunken bar-top dance to “One for My Baby.” I have to point out that this movie, as watched by the poet Alice Notley on late-night TV, became the stuff of her husband Ted Berrigan’s last poem, “This Will Be Her Shining Hour,” which may be found online in the November 1983 Poetry Project Newsletter: it’s domestic comedy at 4:00 a.m. ★★★★ (TCM)

[The song “My Shining Hour” runs through the movie.]

*

Undercover Girl (dir. Joseph Pevney, 1950). “I’m not giving up my uniform for an apron”: Alexis Smith is a rookie cop who goes undercover as a drug dealer to find the men who murdered her father, himself a crooked cop. Smith is fine playing two personalities, the rookie Chris Miller and the louche, mink-wearing Sal Willis, and Gladys George has a memorable turn as Chris’s unsuspecting informant Liz Crow, a once-glamorous underworld gal now dying in a hospital bed. The bad guys add value: Gerald Mohr as the cheaply suave kingpin, Edmond Ryan as a doctor (treating “internal diseases of men and women”), Mel Archer as a big silent guy with a neck brace, Royal Dano as a needy, seedy hood with pin-up girls on his ties. Many tense moments as Chris’s cover is nearly blown and, finally, blown. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (dir. Gordon Douglas, 1950). It’s a variation on White Heat, with James Cagney as Ralph Cotter, alias Paul Murphy, a psychopathic gangster whose killing spree begins as he escapes from a prison farm. This movie is full of colorful characters: the sister of a railroaded convict (Barbara Payton), a radio repairman who’s in way over his head (Steve Brodie), a rich girl (Helena Carter) who’s the disciple of a quack metaphysician (Herbert Heyes), and, especially, a dissolute lawyer (Luther Adler) eager to join in any criminal scheme.It’s amusing to see Ward Bond and Barton MacLane, cops in The Maltese Falcon, as cops on the wrong side of the law here. Best moments: Ralph pretending to be normal. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Growing Up Female (dir. Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, 1971). A short documentary with one girl and five women talking about their lives. To watch it is to recognize how far our culture has come and how far back some forces at work in our culture want to take us. A twelve-year-old talks matter-of-factly about how she can run as fast as or faster than some boys; a guidance counselor explains that a wife is responsible for all childcare and housekeeping; a cosmetologist declares that a woman’s needs are to be fulfilled only by her husband. And a mother of young children: “You get so that you think you’re gonna scream if you can’t talk to an adult.” ★★★★ (CC)

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

Mooch, planning

[Mutts, February 29, 2024.]

In today’s Mutts, it’s “Hairball Thursday.” Mooch uses a planner and quotation marks.

Criterion in The New York Times

“Criterion’s success in marketing beautiful, strange, complex movies is the road not taken by most of Hollywood: a steadfast belief in the value of human creativity and curation over the output of any algorithm”: “Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?”