Cleanup on aisle 45

Kamala Harris: “What we have done is clean up Donald Trump’s mess.”

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Donald Trump: “They’re eating the pets.”

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Kamala Harris: “World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.”

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Donald Trump, about offering an alternative to the Affordable Care Act: “I have concepts of a plan.”

The New Grown-Ups: “Cumberland Gap”

Our son Ben Leddy is a member of The New Grown-Ups, who just took first in a new-band showcase at the Thomas Point Beach Bluegrass Festival in Brunswick, Maine. That’s a sample above.

Notice the New Grown-Ups logo, top left. Ben is a clever guy. He’s on mandolin. All said and done.

A related post
The New Grown-Ups at Bandcamp

EXchange names sighting

The Great Bernzini (Joe Pesci), a photographer loosely based on Weegee, wants to capture a mob hit as it happens. To do so, he must figure out which Italian restaurant is hosting the private party where the hit is to take place. So he starts calling around for a reservation to find out who’ll be closed to the public tonight. From The Public Eye (dir. Howard Franklin, 1992). Click any image for a larger view.


The EXchange names and street names are real. I looked up enough of the restaurant names in the 1940 Manhattan directory to feel pretty sure that they’re all fictional. And the pages are, of course, fictional. Look closely and you can see the paste-up.

Related reading
All OCA EXchange name posts (Pinboard)

Typo alerts

From the podcast Mac Power Users, episode 760. Stephen Hackett is talking with David Sparks about readers calling attention to typos:

“Nine times out of ten that comes with an apology attached, like ‘Oh, hey, I’m sorry, I found this.‘ Thank you for sending them in. We didn’t catch it, we want to be accurate and correct, and there’s nothing worse — I’m sure you’ve had this experience too — where you come across a blog post from eight years ago and there’s a typo in it. That’s been on the Internet for almost a decade, and no one told you. It’s the worst feeling, so thank you for sending those in.”

That’s my attitude too.

James Earl Jones (1931–2024)

James Earl Jones has died at the age of ninety-three. The Guardian has an obituary.

Darth Vader? Mufasa? Sure. But I always think of him as Lear.

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

One of those moments: Wait, is that ________? Yes, that’s ________.

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll be on and off the computer this morning and will drop a hint when I can if one is needed.

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9:04 a.m.: The answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Fifty blog-description lines

For many years the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s song “Orange Crate Art” — “Orange crate art was a place to start” — served as what Blogger calls a “blog description line.” In May 2010, I began to vary the line, always choosing some word or words or element of punctuation from a post then on the front page, and always keeping the quotation marks that had enclosed Van Dyke’s words. I like looking back at these bits of language from a distance. Sometimes I recognize the context at once. “Puissance without hauteur”? Bob and Ray. “Fifty years late?” I had to look it up. I didn’t catch the repetition of “Traffic and weather.”

“Traffic and weather on the eights”
“Eccentric adventures”
“It’s just . . . it’s notes.”
“That ain't hay”
“As well-lit as a good film noir”
“Write a blog instead of posting to Twitter or Facebook”
“In so-called adult life”
“Perimeter oscillations”
“E.g, i.e., etc.”
“One fluke visible”
“Puissance without hauteur”
“Shortened studies”
“Created from a combination of many small precise
    decisions”
“Fifty years late”
“Mostly groovy”
“Great typos”
“Things keep accumulating”
“I wanna be where the people are”
“In the pencil what?”
“Office fritters”
“Books, always books”
“Scholarly voracity”
“:~:”
“Against the terrible odds of syntax”
“One more way to look like an outlier”
“Thick with virtual dust”
“ Are we really doing this?”
“I don’t feel human uptown”
“Tired of hitting”
“F♯min Emaj7 F♯min Emaj7 G♯min D E C B”
“Typing and typing”
“Is it raining on the phone, or outside?”
“Rattle OK”
“Viva música, bendita música”
“However fleeting, however partial”
“In the new old-fashioned way”
“Writer-y”
“It’s not as if we have only a finite supply of commas
    available”
“Subjects and verbs”
“You sure we’ve come to the right place?”
“To please not call me ‘Doctor’”
“‘Meticulous,’ ‘commendable,’ ‘intricate’”
“Knock, knock, who’s there?”
“Inventory”
“Got hyphens?”
“Get up, dress up, and show up”
“It goes idea by idea”
“I've run my random character generator”
“Traffic and weather”
“Please change your hold music”

More blog-description lines
Two hundred blog-description lines : Fifty more : And fifty more : But wait — there’s more : Another fifty : Is there no end to this folly? : It would appear not : Still more items in a series

“Red flags for scholars of fascism”

Heather Cox Richardson usually takes a break from writing Letters from an American and posts a photograph as the week ends. But this weekend she was writing, about an increasingly aberrant presidential candidate. From the September 7 installment of Letters from an American :

Trump has always invented his stories from whole cloth, but there used to be some way to tie them to reality. Today that seemed to be gone. He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.

This installment of Letters from an American, like every other installment of Letters from an American, deserves a wide audience.

Neon in semi-daylight

[4920 New Utrecht Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

“Neon in daylight is a / great pleasure”: Frank O’Hara, in “A Step Away from Them,” imagining what his friend and fellow poet Edwin Denby would write.

I chose this photograph for its neon in semi-daylight, vivid in the shadow of the El. The band of light between the El and the buildings looks itself a bit like neon, or at least like fluorescence.

A quick check of online sources shows that in 1909 the 4920 address housed a saloon. A neighborhood miscreant passed a bad check there. The construction of the El in 1914 led to lawsuits from the owner of 4920 and other property owners on the block over noise, darkness, and decreased rental value, with damages paid out in 1922. In 1933 4920 may have housed a delicatessen.

The property may have been undergoing an identity crisis when its tax photograph was taken. Was it a bar & grill? (Look closely.) A delicatessen? (Look closely.) A liquor store? (Look closely.) The 1940 telephone directory has it as a restaurant:

[Click for a larger view.]

Two brands of beer are advertised in the window, Breldt’s and Ox Head. The Peter Breldt Brewing Company was based in Elizabeth, New Jersey. During Prohibition, the Peter Breldt Company, minus the Brewing, brewed near beer that was too near. Ox Head was a product of the Wehle Brewing Company, West Haven, Connecticut.

In 1949, just days after a liquor license was issued to the Utrecht Restaurant (to a new owner?), this advertisement appeared in The Brooklyn Eagle:

[The Brooklyn Eagle, March 20, 1949.]

Someone was cleaning house.

The Utrecht Restaurant, still operating under that name, received another liquor license (for yet another owner?) in 1963. In 1964 the liquor license for this address went to the Boro Lounge. Today the first floor of 1420 is split between Emil’s Shoes and Zion Car Service.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : C. O. Bigelow : Minetta Tavern : Saratoga Bar and Cafe

Sanewashing

Margaret Sullivan, former public editor at The New York Times writes about “the power of a single word about media malfeasance.” The word is sanewashing. The immediate context: reporting about Trump’s bizarre non-answer to a question about the cost of childcare:

Why does the media sanewash Trump? It’s all a part of the false-equivalence I’ve been writing about here in which candidates are equalized as an ongoing gesture of performative fairness.

And it’s also, I believe, because of the restrained language of traditional objective journalism. That’s often a good thing; it’s part of being careful and cautious. But when it fails to present a truthful picture, that practice distorts reality.

[From the Times: “The crisis for middle-class families struggling with child care? The economic growth he said would be spurred by things like tariffs.”]