Sondheim Blackwings at auction

Gunther at Lexikaliker sent the news that three boxes of Stephen Sondheim’s Blackwing pencils have sold at auction for $6,400.

Like Stephen at pencil talk, I noticed the difference between the words on the pencil — “Half the pressure, twice the speed” — and the words on the box — “Write with half the pressure, twice the speed.” To my ear, what’s on the pencil sounds so much more modern.

Right before seeing the news of the Blackwings, I saw a short video sent by my friend Joe: “Most of the lead in your pencil ends up in the bin.” Sharpening one of those Blackwings would be some pretty expensive sharpening.

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June 20: There’s a catalogue (free) with all lots. This page shows some of the winning bids — e.g., $25,600 for four thesauruses. Amazing, astonishing, marvelous, incredible.

The Merriam-Webster’s Second that I mentioned in this post doesn’t appear in the catalogue.

Related posts
Sondheim with a Blackwing : Sondheim’s writing habits (Blackwings and legal pads) : All OCA Blackwing posts (Pinboard)

Chatbots and Russian propaganda

A wiretap at Mar-a-Lago? A Ukrainian troll factory working to influence American elections? Axios reports that “the leading AI chatbots are regurgitating Russian misinformation.”

Willie Mays (1931–2024)

“An exuberant style of play and an effervescent personality made Mays one of the game’s, and America’s, most charismatic figures, a name that even people far afield from the baseball world recognized instantly as a national treasure”: from the New York Times obituary (gift link).

Juneteenth

There’s still — still — no stamp. But there is a flag, designed by Ben Haith. And an explanation.

[Click for a larger image.]

The nineteenth is Juneteenth.

Related reading
All OCA Juneteenth posts (Pinboard)

Margie in 1952

I had occasion to look at a 2021 OCA post about the Remington Rand Photocharger, a long-gone piece of library technology that I remember from my Brooklyn childhood. When I followed that post back to a short film from the Brooklyn Public Library with a glimpse of the RRP in action, I was startled to see our friend Margie King Barab, then Margie Lou Swett, in a scene with high-school students, or “high-school students,” sketching costume plates in the library. In 1952, Margie was a twenty-year-old actress and singer in New York City. Her high-school days were back in Nebraska.

[From The Library: A Family Affair (1952). Margie appears at the 10:25 mark. Click for a larger view.]

A 2020 OCA post has much more about Margie’s television appearances and about a Naked City episode with characters who appear to be modeled on Margie and her first husband, the writer and raconteur Alexander King.

You can see if I’m seeing things by looking at screenshots from an episode of Naked City in which Margie appears uncredited. Or compare the screenshot above with a Carl Van Vechten portrait of Alex and Margie King. That’s Margie, for sure, in the Brooklyn Public Library and in the Naked City elevator.

Related posts
Seymour Barab (1921–2014) : Margie King Barab (1932–2018)

“We did not lose it”

Manya Lodge (Mady Christians) is happy that the house of women she’s moved into is to be run as a democracy. Helen Stacey (Patricia Collinge) tries to help her finish a sentence. From Tender Comrade ( dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1943):

“Once in Germany we had a democracy, but we —”

“You lost it.”

“Nein. We did not lose it. We let it be murdered — like a little child.”

Another of those moments from 1940s movies that feel so relevant to our time.

Recently unpdated

Trump’s “bing” It turns out that Goodfellas is among Donald Trump’s favorite movies.

Eleven movies, one series

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Classic Film Time, Criterion Channel, DVD, Max, a theater (imagine!), YouTube.]

The House of Fear (dir. Roy William Neill, 1945). Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Doctor Watson (Nigel Bruce) are off to Scotland to investigate the strange doings at Drearcliffe House, the castle home of seven unmarried men who call themselves the Good Comrades. One by one they’re being killed, each receiving an envelope containing orange seeds — seven, then six, and so on. I always find the logic at work in a Holmes story hilariously improbable. And I must wonder how useful Holmes is anyway: his presence at Drearcliffe does nothing to prevent the Comrades from being knocked off one by one though no one seems to have a problem with that. ★★ (YT)

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He Who Dances on Wood (dir. Jessica Beshir, 2016). A short portrait of Fred Nelson, a man who tap dances on a wooden slab under a Central Park bridge. (He likes the sound.) A lovely portrait of a man for all seasons (literally, dancing in all weathers), doing what he does for the happiness of it, no money invited. Here is the Manhattan I’d like to visit again. ★★★★ (CC)

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Hair Wolf (dir. Mariama Diallo, 2018). A satiric commentary on cultural appropriation, with white women coming to a Black salon in search of dreads. The twist: the women are quasi-zombies, sucking the life out of Black culture. What’s a stylist to do? Another of the many short, easy-to-overlook movies at the Criterion Channel, and one that won a host of awards. ★★★★ (CC)

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Daughter of Darkness (dir. Lance Comfort, 1948). Emily (Siobhan McKenna) is a meek, virginal Irish servant-girl working on an English family’s farm. But she has a past — and when that past shows up in England, murder is in the air. A spectacularly creepy Gothic story, with a burning barn, a church organ playing in the middle of the night, and a vicious dog wandering in the rain. Look for Honor Blackman (Goldfinger ) as a farm daughter. (CFT) ★★★★

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The Man in Grey (dir. Leslie Arliss, 1943). It’s a Gainsborough melodrama, beginning in a London auction house in 1943 and moving back to the nineteenth century to tell the story of two girlhood friends, Hesther and Clarissa (Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert), the first of whom runs away from school for love, the second of whom enters into a loveless marriage with “the man in grey” (as a portrait will depict him), the Marquess of Rohan (James Mason), who was seeking a partner to serve as his “brood sow.” A fortune teller warned Clarissa in girlhood not to trust in the friendship of women, but when she and Hesther cross paths in adulthood at a performance of Othello (Hesther playing Desdemona to Stewart Granger’s Othello), the friendship is rekindled, with complications to follow. A lavish production that moves awfully slowly. Hint: look closely at the actors in the opening auction-house scene. ★★★ (CC)

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The Violent Years (dir. William Morgan, 1956). A quartet of high-school girls start by robbing gas stations, and things get much worse from there. The screenplay is by Ed Wood, which helps explain the heavyhanded screenplay (a judge lecturing parents) and general weirdness (the scene with the couple in the car). As a movie, it’s hilariously bad, so bad that as trash cinema, it deserves four stars, one for each villainess. My favorite line: “These aren’t kids; these are morons.” ★★★★ (YT)

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Tender Comrade (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1943). Four defense-plant workers with husbands and a son in military service pool their resources to rent a house and pay a live-in housekeeper (a German immigrant whose husband, too, is also fighting the Nazis). Ginger Rogers and Robert Ryan star, with Madys Christians, Patricia Collinge, Kim Hunter, and Ruth Hussey as the house’s other occupants. Highly uneven, with hokey dialogue, stretches of dismal propaganda, and moments of utter pathos — and I shudder to think how the moments of pathos must have struck audiences in 1943. Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, with a title not from Communism but from Robert Louis Stevenson. ★★★ (TCM)

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Song of Love (dir. Clarence Brown, 1947). A love triangle with music: Robert Schumann (Paul Henreid), Clara Schumann (Katharine Hepburn), and Johannes Brahms (Robert Walker). Great music (with Arthur Rubinstein filling in at the piano), great costumes and sets. It’s difficult for me to imagine the emotions on display here making the right impression on at least some 2024 moviegoers (I recall some of my students laughing during the Homer-Wilma bedroom scene in The Best Years of Our Lives.) A great thing about this movie: it manages to suggest — on film — the magic that sometimes happens with live performance, as when Clara plays a final “Träumerei.” ★★★★ (TCM)

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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Wes Ball, 2024). An extended struggle between rival ape clans, with the occasional human being to complicate matters. So many overtones: from the Iliad, with the cry “For Caesar” echoing “For Patroclus,” to On the Waterfront, with a hero battered as his comrades look on. Visually stunning, incoherent at times, far too long, and screaming sequel as it ends. The best scene, for me: not one of the many spectacular chases or fights but the discovery of the reading primer. ★★★ (T)

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The Walls Came Tumbling Down (dir. Lothar Mendes, 1946). It’s The Maltese Falcon on the cheap. A priest dies, and a newspaper columnist (Lee Bowman), a semi-mysterious woman (Marguerite Chapman), and several bad guys (George Macready) search for the Bibles that hold the answer to the whereabouts of a missing Leonardo painting of Joshua at the battle of Jericho. Yet another movie billed as film noir in which everything is bright as day. One surprising plus: the use of a dictionary to disarm a gunman. ★★★ (YT)

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Mind Over Murder (dir. Nanfu Wang, 2022). A six-part documentary series about the Beatrice (Nebraska) Six, three men and three women wrongly convicted in 1989 of the rape and murder of an elderly widow, Helen Wilson. Five of the six charged believed that they had participated. The story that unfolds features a self-styled local hero, a sheriff’s department psychologist, a craven district attorney, a shoddy laboratory analyst, the six men and women convicted, and family members of the victim. What most struck me: a dramatization of the case, staged by a community theater group with a script drawn from official transcripts, seems at first an unnecessary distraction, but it proves to be the emotional high point of the movie, a living lesson in the power of tragic drama to produce catharsis. ★★★★ (M)

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Crashout (dir. Lewis R. Foster, 1955). An ensemble movie, with a motley group of escaped convicts, the six of thirty-eight who have survived a prison break: an autocratic leader (William Bendix), a wise guy (Arthur Kennedy), a religious fanatic (William Talman), a self-styled ladies’ man (Luther Adler), a basic brute (Gene Evans), and a younger man convicted of murder for what he says was an accident (Marshall Thompson). Their travels — away from prison, but never to true freedom — bring them into contact with a country doctor (Percy Helton), roadhouse denizens, cops, a railroad conductor, and two women who complicate their lives, a failed music student (Gloria Talbott), and a farm woman (Barbara Michaels) with a child out of wedlock. It’s a brutal movie, even by modern standards, and never less than compelling. My favorite scene: the train, with sandwiches. ★★★★ (YT)

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

The Proust aisle, revisited

I saw Wal-Mart’s madeleines again and had to try some. (This time they had a future expiration date.) These madeleines are not bad. In fact, they’re surprisingly good.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard) : Madeleine (With the beginning of the key Proust passage)

[I prefer the traditional hyphenated spelling: Wal-Mart.]

A joke in the traditional manner

For this day, a joke in the traditional manner: i.e., a dad joke. My dad, James Leddy, was making them before anyone called them dad jokes. (Merriam-Webster’s first known use: 1987).

Why was the car going so slowly?

The punchline is in the comments. Happy Father’s Day to all.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Did you hear about the new insect hybrid? : Did you hear about the shape-shifting car? : Did you hear about the thieving produce clerk? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : How do amoebas communicate? : How do birds communicate with distant family and friends? : How do ghosts hide their wrinkles? : How do worms get to the supermarket? : Of all the songs in the Great American Songbook, which is the favorite of pirates? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the one snowman say to the other? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What do cows like to watch on TV? : What do dogs always insist on when they buy a car? : What do ducks like to eat? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : What kind of pasta do swimmers like? : What’s the name of the Illinois town where dentists want to live? : What’s the worst thing about owning nine houses? : What was the shepherd doing in the garden? : Where do amoebas golf? : Where does Paul Drake keep his hot tips? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Who’s the lead administrator in a school of fish? : Why are supervillains good at staying warm in the winter? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : Why is the Fonz so cool? : Why sharpen your pencil to write a Dad joke? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

And from very young joke tellers: a joke in a neo-traditional manner and a joke in a non-traditional manner.

[My dad gets credit for the Autobahn, the elementary school, the Golden Retriever, Bela Lugosi, Samuel Clemens, the doctor, the plumber, the senior citizen, Oliver Hardy, and the ophthalmologist. Elaine gets credit for the birds and the Illinois town. Ben gets credit for the supervillains in winter. The snowman joke is by an unknown hand.]