“A goddamned Greek chorus”

As time went on, Robert Caro writes, Robert Moses “had no respect for anyone’s opinion but his own.” From The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Once Moses had at least listened to his own aides, allowed them to argue with him, tested his opinions against theirs. But now that had changed, too. In the In the first days of his power, he had hired aides whose opinions were worth listening to. He had selected men for ability, engineering ability, legal ability. The aides he was hiring now had also to possess an additional ability: the ability to say, “Yes, sir.”

“Lunches at Moses’ office were really starting to get pretty sickening,” recalls one top La Guardia official. “Even if he only had one guest, he would always have six or eight of his ‘Moses Men’ — ‘my muchachos,’ he used to call them — at the table and it was all ‘Yes, sir, RM,’ ‘No, sir, RM,’ ‘Right as usual, RM!’ When he laughed, they laughed, only louder — you know what I mean. Christ, when he made a statement, you could look around the table and see eight heads nodding practically in unison. It was like a goddamned Greek chorus.”

Reuben Lazarus, invited by Moses to become chief counsel for the Triborough Bridge Authority, refused — “I didn’t want to be a doormat for any man” — and when Moses asked him to recommend one of his assistants, Lazarus selected the one who, he had noticed, “doesn’t answer back,” and in the taxi taking William Lebwohl to lunch with Moses, told him what was going to be expected of him: “You’re going to have to be able to bend over and take a kick in the ass and say ‘Thank you, sir,’ with a smile. ” At the luncheon, Lazarus recalls, “Lebwohl did not answer back.” Moses hired him — and kept him on as Triborough counsel for more than thirty years.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

[It’s not that the chorus necessarily agrees with someone in authority; it’s that the chorus speaks as one, at least usually.]

Deco elevator

[From Shopworn (dir. Nick Grinde, 1932). Click any image for a larger view.]

Yes, the display takes up the screen as the elevator rises.

Shopworn (starring Barbara Stanwyck) is streaming in the Criterion Channel’s Pre-Code Columbia collection.

William Labov (1927–2024)

He was a giant of linguistics. The New York Times has an obituary.

I had the chance to hear William Labov give a talk in 2007, “The Growing Divergence of English Dialects in North America.” I took that chance, and wrote something about the talk.

A Labov comment about communication and truthfulness that has stuck with me: “A parrot can say ‘I will meet you downtown at 8:00’ — but he won’t be there.”

Two related posts
The long e : A vowel shift in the wild

A Christmas song

I’ve come to think of it as the greatest Christmas song of all time (sorry, Mel Tormé). From 1929, it’s the Cotton Top Sanctified Singers, with “Christ Was Born on Christmas Morn.”

Christmas 1924

[“Yule Joy for Poor, Aged, Young And Ill.” The New York Times, December 26, 1924.]

In 2024, Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it. Happy Hanukkah to all who celebrate it. Happy Kwanzaa to all who celebrate it. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote yesterday, “Happy holidays to you all, however you celebrate ... or don’t.”

A Christmas Eve joke in the traditional manner

Found on a whiteboard and shared by my friend Stefan Hagemann:

What did Santa pay for his sleigh?

The answer is in the comments.

One series, eleven movies

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

A Man on the Inside (created by Michael Schur, 2024). An eight-episode series with a silly premise: Charles, a retired professor of engineering (an ultra-natty Ted Danson), answers a newspaper ad and goes undercover to investigate a theft in a retirement community. Anyone who’s been around the world of assisted living and memory care is likely to find this series’s representations true to life (and death). There are funny complications: the private investigator employing Charles poses as his daughter, which means that his daughter has to pose as his niece; a cranky resident sees Charles as his sexual rival. The best moments: Charles’s conversations with fellow residents Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Gladys (Susan Ruttan), and his recitation of the “seven ages” speech from As You Like It. ★★★★ (N)

*

Strange Way of Life (dir. Pedro Amodóvar, 2023). A short, in which a sheriff, Jake (Ethan Hawke), and a rancher, Silva (Pedro Pascal), once lovers, reunite after twenty-five years apart. But it’s Jake’s hunt for Silva’s son (a suspected murderer) that brings about the reunion. A witty queer western, with all the proper tropes, even a three-way standoff. Best line, spoken by Silva: “Years ago, you asked me what two men could do living together on a ranch.” ★★★★ (N)

*

The Whale (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2022). From a play by Samuel D. Hunter, in which Charlie, a morbidly obese teacher of online English composition classes, hides from his students (claiming a faulty webcam) and from the world. An estranged daughter (Sadie Sink), a friend and caregiver (Hong Chau), and a missionary from an end-times sect (Ty Simpkins) become frequent visitors, and Charlie’s hard-drinking estranged wife (Samantha Morton) drops in just once. Present in memory is the now-dead male partner for whom Charlie left his wife and daughter. A credible performance from Fraser, but the other principals are unconvincing, the dialogue stilted, the production stagey, the storyline improbable in so many ways (call 911, dammit), the ending absurd, and the talk about honest and amazing writing so patently ridiculous that I remembered what I heard a person in the row in front of me whisper to a companion during a (Broadway!) performance of ’night, Mother : “I can’t believe people are taking this seriously.” ★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Pre-Code Columbia feature

Ladies of Leisure (dir. Frank Capra, 1930). Barbara Stanwyck is Kay Arnold, a “party girl” (we might say “escort”); Ralph Graves is Jerry Strong, an aspiring painter from a wealthy family. Chance brings the two together, and the differences in their stations in life threaten to pull them apart. Marie Prevost as Kay’s roommate and Lowell Sherman as a client bring some comedy to the slow-moving proceedings. Best scenes: the painter’s studio, seen through a rainy window, and Kay’s impassioned speech to Jerry’s mother. ★★★

Forbidden (dir. Frank Capra, 1932). Stanwyck again, as Lulu, “old lady four-eyes,” a small-town librarian who uses all her savings for a cruise to Havana and finds herself in a cabin across the hall from Bob (Adolphe Menjou), a charming older man. Their romance continues ashore in Havana and back in the States, but Bob is married (of course) and has political ambitions. Menjou is no “Bob” (such a strange name for such a glamorous man), but Stanwyck is great as a woman torn between preserving a relationship and preserving her dignity. Ralph Bellamy appears as a cruel newspaperman and Bob’s rival. ★★★

Shopworn (dir. Nick Grinde, 1932). “A waitress — oh, my heart!” Barbara Stanwyck can’t catch a break: here she plays Kitty Lane, waitressing in a college-town café, where a romance develops with medical student David Livingston (Regis Toomey). His mother (Clara Blandick) doesn’t approve, but not to worry: everything gets worked out, and surprisingly so, in a mere seventy-two minutes. Best moment: the mother and her lawyer walking to Kitty’s humble house. ★★★★

*

Best. Christmas. Ever! (dir. Mary Lambert, 2023). Heather Graham and Brandy Norwood play one-time best friends whose families spend Christmas together because of faulty driving directions. Weird inappropriateness, abundant stupidity, and snow that seems to appear and disappear. An incoherent mess. And I’ll never think of the words “moving furniture” without thinking of this movie. ★ (N)

*

Meet Me Next Christmas (dir. Rusty Cundieff, 2024). The premise: strangers Layla (Christina Milian) and James (Kofi Siriboe) met in an airport lounge and promised to meet next Christmas for a Pentatonix concert if they’re unattached. But tickets are scarce, which means that Layla must hire a personal concierge, scruffy Teddy (Devale Ellis), to find a ticket so she can meet tall, handsome James. And you can already guess that it will be Teddy who carries the day — but you could not have guessed that the quest for the ticket will require Layla and Teddy to compete in a drag-heavy lip-sync contest. As Elaine observed, the members of the Pentatonix serve as the gods in this story, watching over the mortals as they lip-sync their way to happiness. ★★ (N)

*

The Only Girl in the Orchestra (dir. Molly O’Brien, 2023). A short documentary portrait of Orin O’Brien, double bassist, the first woman to join the New York Philharmonic (in 1966), about to retire after fifty-five years as her frankly adoring niece was making this film. O’Brien must be one of the coolest octogenarians in the world: she’s smart, funny, ultra-energetic, still devoted to her students and her instrument. Fun fact: O’Brien, who never sought stardom, is the daughter of early movie stars George O’Brien (who starred in Sunrise ) and Marguerite Churchill. I’m always interested in films that show people doing their work — Crumb, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and ‌Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb come immediately to mind — and this movie does that, beautifully. ★★★★ (N)

*

Internes Can’t Take Money (dir. Alfred Santell, 1937). Barbara Stanwyck is Janet Haley, gangster’s widow, ex-con, factory worker, searching for the little daughter her late husband took away. Joel McCrea is Dr. Jimmie Kildaire — the screen’s first Dr. Kildaire — and once again a relationship develops across class boundaries. Plenty of barroom talk and gangsterism, and some lewd talk using popcorn as a metaphor (at least they weren’t talking about moving the furniture). Along with McCrea and Stanwyck, the Art Deco hospital is a star in this movie. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Night Walker (dir. William Castle, 1964). Barbara Stanwyck’s final big-screen role, as Irene Trent, the wife of a spooky blind inventor. Irene dreams of a lover; her husband dies in an explosion (or does he?); and the imaginary lover appears to Irene in what might be called waking dreams. Only a kind lawyer (Robert Taylor, Stanwyck’s one-time husband) is there to stand by Irene through this strange ordeal. Sheer craziness, lots of screams, several real scares, and a screenplay by Robert Bloch, writer of the novel Psycho. ★★★ (YT)

*

Karen Kingsbury’s Maggie’s Christmas Miracle (dir. Michael Robison, 2017). I subject myself to a random Hallmark movie every “holiday season,” but alas, this one was not as bad as I’d hoped, with its predictable elements (sad backstories, an endearing waif, the Black friend, moments of awkwardness) offset by some genuinely grown-up moments between the two (straight, white) principals. There is also an ample helping of weirdness: a diner that becomes a pop-up Christmas shop in winter, a tradition called the Christmas Stroll for which the stores on Main Street close (?!) and the storekeepers hand out cider and cocoa, the insane number of Christmas decorations in the male lead’s apartment (count the trees), and the miracle that ties the elements of the story together. ★★ (H)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Raindrop.io)

Marisa Paredes (1946–2024)

“Best known to international audiences for her work with directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Guillermo del Toro and Roberto Benigni.” Best known to me from her work with Almodóvar. The Guardian has an obituary.

Mary Miller and Fabrice Ambrosini

In Mother Jones, David Axelrod writes about Donald, Leon, and the German far-right:

“So where’s my German friends?” Donald Trump asked a fawning Mar-a-Lago crowd on Election Day, before flashing a grin and a thumbs up for a photo with a group of young men. The German friends in question: Fabrice Ambrosini, a former politician forced to resign after a video surfaced of him doing a Hitler salute; Leonard Jäger, a far-right influencer who has promoted the Reichsbürger movement, an extremist group behind a failed coup attempt in 2022; and Phillipp-Anders Rau, a candidate for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s far-right party.

And here’s a Guardian article with more photographs and more background on the visitors.

Mary Miller, our representative in Congress (IL-15), was there too. Here she poses with Fabrice Ambrosini:

[Mary Miller (R, IL-15) and Fabrice Ambrosini. Click for a larger view.]

This photograph, credited only to “Instagram,” appeared at MeidasNews, where Miller is misidentified as “Carol.” No, that’s our Mary, the one who said that “Hitler was right on one thing.”

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Raindrop.io)

[I sent MeidasNews a correction in November, but the mistaken caption remains unchanged.]

Valves, Valvoline, and singing circuits

I borrowed Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk from the library. “I want to learn more about our next president,” I told the librarian. She laughed. Once home, I opened at random and read these paragraphs:

One unfortunate trend in the 1980s was that cars and computers became tightly sealed appliances. It was possible to open up and fiddle with the innards of the Apple II that Steve Wozniak designed in the late 1970s, but you couldn’t do that with the Macintosh, which Steve Jobs in 1984 made almost impossible to open. Similarly, kids in the 1970s and earlier grew up rummaging under the hoods of cars, tinkering with the carburetors, changing spark plugs, and souping up the engines. They had a fingertip-feel for valves and Valvoline. This hands-on imperative and Heathkit mindset even applied to radios and television sets; if you wanted, you could change the tubes and later the transistors and have a feel for how a circuit board worked.

This trend toward closed and sealed devices meant that most techies who came of age in the 1990s gravitated to software more than hardware. They never knew the sweet smell of a soldering iron, but they could code in ways that made circuits sing. Musk was different. He liked hardware as well as software. He could code, but he also had a feel for physical components, such as battery cells and capacitors, valves and combustion chambers, fuel pumps and fan belts.

In particular, Musk loved fiddling with cars. At the time, he owned a twenty-year-old BMW 300i, and he spent Saturdays rummaging around junkyards in Philadelphia to score the parts he needed to soup it up. It had a four-speed transmission, but he decided to upgrade it when BMW started making a five-speed. Borrowing the lift at a local repair shop, he was able, with a couple of shims and a litte bit of grinding, to jam a five-speed transmission into what had been a four-speed car. “It was really able to haul ass,” he recalls.

Clichés, cheap alliteration, corny phrasing, wild generalizations — all lurching toward utter inanity in that final sentence. “He recalls” — aaugh.

This book has many other pages. But I am hauling ass back to the library.