A seasonally appropriate quiz.
The following excerpt is from a nineteenth century song "composed and sung by Bob Hart, Academy of Music" a "Dedicated to Mr. James Davis and Employees" in the Library of Congress archive of 19th Century Song Sheets. These are the final two verses:
...CHORUS. Whack, row-de-row, &c.
You may talk about your heroes,
But where is one so grand,
Who kindness to his fellows shows,
And rightly understands.
One of this kind
You're sure to find,
If the trouble you will take, sirs.
At twenty-seven Julia street,
Is the prince of boiler-makers.
CHORUS. Whack row-de-row, &c.
Here the honest sons of Vulcan
In their glory you may find;
Their hammers click, the time flies quick,
They never are behind.
The secret's one
That all my own,
It will cost you but the trial,
The [deleted for the quiz] is the thing--
It's a fact, and there's no denial.
CHORUS. Whack row-de-row, &c.
What social reform does this song call for more explicitly in its title and three other verses? (One hint: the reform didn't get put in place legislatively until nearly the middle of the 20th century.)
First correct answer to comments wins a scratched-up LP of Billy Bragg's Worker's Playtime, unless mom threw it out with my old Yes records.
I'm not much of a collector. But I have spent a little time over the past five years picking up used copies of Anchor paperbacks from the mid and late 1950's. Specifically those with covers by Edward Gorey. It's become something of a habit of eye, as I walk by book tables or idly wander through a used bookstore; a certain style in the hand-drawn lettering on the spine is usually a giveaway; but anything close in an Anchor paperback will get a second look from me.
Of course, I could search for these online, but it always seems both pricey and beside the point (the ones I buy are rarely in truly 'collector' shape, and rarely cost me more than a couple of dollars). Moreover, I have never been sure how many of these there actually were.
There are, it turns out, many more than I had ever imagined. Why I hadn't found it before I can't say, but it's a fact that I just found this this site with it's many lovely features and its useful and daunting presentation of Gorey's Anchor covers. It makes my collecting gestures seem even more pitiful.
I don't have Coningsby, or Troilus and Cressida. It's easy enough to find young Maisie (one of his best covers, very dramatic), but I've never before laid eyes on the dandified young hero ofLafcadio's Adventures.
I should be happy that I have a very pretty copy of The Wanderer -- but I think I'd trade it for that True Tales of Crime and Rascality that's right next to it on this page (that one I just might have to search for online).
As far as Conrad goes, my Victory seems less thrilling, because I don't have a Chance. Worse, I'm pretty sure The Secret Agent slipped right under my nose. Sneaky bastard!
Enervated by a summer cold, I have little energy for posting this week, but here are a few things to gawk at if you're bored.
"Our goal would be an Iraq that has territorial integrity, a government that is democratic and pluralistic, a nation where the human rights of every ethnic and religious group are recognized and protected."
--Dick Cheney on war with Iraq. So, that would be just like our democratic, pluralistic ally Saudi Arabia? Or Kuwait?
"Chapter 3: Quick Answers to Beginners' Questions: Am I qualified to teach my children?"
--If you're buying a book with this title, that question has already been answered for you. (This similarly unfortunate title is one you should be sure to put in a drawer when your kids' friends come over.)
"I'd hate to take a bite outta you. You're a cookie full of arsenic."
--As we were savoring the poison-pill dialogue in The Sweet Smell of Success last night, Theresa kept seeing something familiar about the actor playing upstanding jazzman Steve Dallas. Finally, it dawned: he went from acting in a stylish black and white to driving a stylish black and white.
I was listening to the news this morning about the West Nile virus's mostly ignored spread through bird populations in the U.S. (and its more frequently noted appearance in humans), and it brought to mind this question.
Within recorded human history, in terms of numbers of people killed, the bubonic plague epidemic in Europe and Asia in the 14th century is estimated as the most destructive, killing around 75 million people in about 4 years.
By the same standards, when was the second worst epidemic recorded, and what was the disease?
Absolutely no Googling or phone calls to the CDC. The winner receives a packet of antibacterial handi-wipes.
Up at Devil's Lake, N.D., the high school athletic teams need a new nickname.
A few possibilities to get us started:
Let's get a nice list together and send it off to the school board.
A busted digital camera prevents me from bringing to you the disturbing image of the Andy Capp's Salsa Fries which are a new offering in my workplace vending machine (although the "review" I just linked to reveals that the good folks at ConAgra came up with this particular food-substitute some time ago. (I did find a product shot of this related Capp-themed treat.)
Aside from the fact that, as usual, I'm the last kid on the bus about this, is it wrong to find the unlikely marriage of America's favorite drunken cockney anachronism and the rise of multiculti snack food to be a brain-melter? Is this the kind of thing that others take for granted? I mean, "Andy Capp's Hot Curry Fries" I would find a reasonable concept, very Keith Talent.
If you're not in the mood for Mr. Capp's special south-of-the-border style munchies, our vending machine also offers this. Sadly, the Charms website doesn't allow you to clearly see the bag, on which an anthropomorphic ball of "fluffy stuff" smiles at you invitingly.
Byatt's academic mystery-romance is a tour-de-force of scholarly fiction. How to translate this particularly bookish project onto film?
Sorry, let's start again
Neil LaBute's latest project is a startling attempt to graft his very 21st century concerns with men and women onto Byatt's densely woven intellectual entertainment.
No...still doesn't seem like the right...try this one....
In a digital era, when historical research seems better served by DNA sequencing than by sifting through boxed letters in a dusty archives, the concerns of Possession might indeed seem retrograde.
Hell. This isn't working at all. All right, one more shot before bed.
Neil LaBute manages to eviscerate Possession, a quite good book by A.S. Byatt, of most of its virtues in his attempt to make a movie out of it. This is understandable. Byatt's wonderful epistolary ventriloquism, in which two figures, who sound very much like real nineteenth-century poets (Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle in the film), are traced in a secret affair by two characters who sound very much like convincing late-eighties academics (Aaron Eckhart and the inevitable Gwyneth Paltrow), would be really hard to do justice to onscreen. One sort of expected most of the verbal fireworks of Randolph and Christabel's letters to be absent from the film. And that an imaginative filmmaker would find visual and other counterparts to their effects.
Or not. LaBute has replaced just about everything he couldn't work with in Byatt with an amazingly shallow and appallingly dull concoction of his own. His major innovation: change one of the two modern characters from an articulate English scholar on the down-and-out into a hunky, devil-may-care American who talks like he's never read a book and dresses like...well, let's just say that J.Crew ought to have thrown in some major product-placement cash. Eckhart's version of Byatt's Roland is based on George Clooney-senstive-tough-guy charm that would be great in a movie about... I dunno, a heroic fireman who has to save Thanksgiving from terrorists.
Not that Eckhart's I'm-the-laidback-American-foil-to-all-you-uptight-Brits act is what sinks the movie. No, if the rest of the film were any good, this would simply be forgiveable pandering to the U.S., and acceptable homage to the axiom that Some of the Actors Should Be Intensely Attractive. But LaBute's Possession, alas, is so dull that even Jennifer Ehle's seductive smile can't save it. Not that she's given much of a chance. The Victorian characters in an Edward Gorey sketch have more depth than what the script gives Ehle and Northam, as the tortured nineteenth-c. lovers. They're ciphers wearing bustles and long coats.
The modern lead characters get more screen time but are just as insubstantial: we have the uncomfortable experience of being able to predict everything they say to one another, while simultaneously noticing that they've been provided with no discernable motivations for doing anything. We don't know why Roland likes these poets (at least Paltrow's Maud has a briefly-sketched academic persona), or why (as he often insists) he "needs to know" what happened to them. This is screenwriting at its most pathetic: can't manufacture any suspense? Then have one of the characters insist that he's positively immersed in the narrative!
LaBute tries to gain a sense of magic through a few clever cuts between Victorian and present-day characters in the same scene, but these attempts at cinematic verve can't prop up this misbegotten, lifeless waste of time.
There, I think that's about right.
A quick one for a sultry summer morning when my brain is too fogged to find something more compelling or complex.
In 1995, Paul McCartney's handwritten lyrics to "Getting Better" were sold at auction, netting £161,000. Several years later, another set of handrwritten lyrics beat this auction record by more than double.
Who was the writer and what was the song?
The answer is within your heart, so Google not. Winner gets my increasingly large collection of useless business cards from real estate brokers who have failed to return phone calls.
This week our mailbox (or rather, the pile on the floor by the mail slot) was graced by another insert-laden double issue of the New Yorker. These double issues are so particularly welcome because they provide special opportunities to review the latest trends in magazine “special advertising sections,” sections I get to know intimately as I tear them carefully out of the magazine in hopes that I can then actually figure out where the articles start and end.
I needn’t, in this case, have bothered, because reading the ads might have been a better route to getting both information on food and some editorial content that didn't make me think about canceling my subscription. Whether it’s underwhelming sandwich-worship, an under-reported treatment of restaurant inspectors, or a dance around the edges of what could be an interesting piece about wine, this issue has got something half-baked for every customer.
Food writing, I submit, is a trap for most writers. It highlights pretention, reveals stuff that savvy essayists (as opposed to crankish and undisciplined webloggers) should keep close to the vest, and demands a very hard-to-satisfy balance between the need to convey expertise and to relate what the writer experiences. Many writers aren’t experts about food, yet not-so-secretly fantasize that they’re in, like, the 97th percentile of Those-Who-Know-About-Food. There is something about writing about food that drives a person to protest very seriously their amateur status, and yet toss off the fact that they yearly at Christmas whip up their grandmother’s recipe for [insert arcane continental dish here], and that (of course) they’ve often thought about how their lives would be different if they had taken up...
Above, writing about food and the cooking profession opens the door to a horde of clichés, which, unless one has some other line of defense, immediately barge in and take over the piece. The chef is the last of the craftsman-artists, yes, yes. The kitchen is a rough-and-tumble environment. Who knew? After work chefs drink and smoke and get fuckin’ crazy, man. Gosh! Thanks, Bill Buford! Mario Batali sure is an enigmatic man-child!
And eating is like music, it’s like philosophy, and of course (the old favorite) like travel, preferably to appropriately rustic location that sounds both exotic and comforting (this almost always means Tuscany, by the way). Adam Gopnik, I’m looking in your direction.
(All of this goes down particularly badly because of another thing you smell a lot of in this issue: the chokingly self-satisfied sense of entitlement. All eating as event-dining, even (and especially) when it is formulated as casual. Page after page, this issue is a chronicle of conspicuous consumption of the most depressing kind. And it comes wrapped in page after page of writing which points up the close friendships between the writers and their subjects: there's not a chef here who comes off poorly. Nor is there a moment of self-consciousness in Bill Buford's head that he is getting, as a joyride, the kind of training other people desperately hope to acquire. It's all just part of the big, glamorous party! And isn't that what food is about?)
What else? Oh, and flavor combinations which sound weird really taste quite good, because these chefs are geniuses! Also, if you go and really work with a chef, like in his professional environment, you’ll have great anecdotes to tell, which will sound a little like Tony Bourdain’s, but, you know, different.
That Trillin piece I linked to above – is there a more irritating pretension than pretending to be just an ordinary guy? A perfectly good idea: can people tell red wine from white? Nifty. But this is not that article. This is an article about how funny it is to Trillin that people say that they can, and how he is from Missouri. It didn’t really tell me anything about wine. This may be the purest subtlety, and perhaps I simply have not developed the proper taste to appreciate it. But to paraphrase a famous New Yorker moment, I say it’s a lousy, self-indulgent issue, and I say the hell with it.
Flooding in central Europe has become disastrous enough to make U.S. headlines; of course, in the midst of human tragedy our news media know far too well that nothing will hold our attention like seeing animals being rescued. 80+ people are dead, but it's the picture of the rhino that grabs the reader.
Possibly the most unwelcome phrase one can hear while making use of public transportation is "police action." It was the last stop in Brooklyn on the Q, and various uncoordinated pronouncements from the train conductors (who didn't have much information) and the station PA (a godlike voice heard seldom, and always from a maddeningly undisclosed location: one might be getting instructions from the station manager or from some Transit Authority command bunker miles away) offered a charmingly varied set of directives and updates, along the lines of (a) This train is out of service, take the R train across the platform a couple of stops, and then transfer to another line; (b) Nothing is going to Manhattan from here; go to the downtown platform, take a train BACK one stop and transfer there to another line, or (c) "We're being held in the station by the dispatcher."
As is often the case in these situations, passengers turned to one another for information. Those who couldn't hear got the story from those who could. Seeing a group cross the platform hurriedly I walked across myself and asked a young guy on that train what was happening. He repeated what the conductor had said (see above, c) and then patiently answered the same question from a woman two seconds behind me. No one argued, people shared the Look of Whaddayagunnado, and a resigned sense of being "in it together" reigned. Most went back to their newspapers. I felt proud of our little community of unflappable, civil riders.
Then the godlike PA spoke again, reiterating message (b). Suddenly I realized that there was another train station, on a different line, a mere half-block away. That train would get me to work just as easily. Would it be overloaded with refugees from this benighted line? Few people were at this point leaving, choosing instead to believe the orders would change again and the train would resume its journey -- and who wanted to head out into the punishing heat? But this car was getting warmer by the minute, sitting with the doors open.
Impulse took hold; I dashed out and up the stairs and ran the infernal seventy-five yards or so down Flatbush; bolted into the other station to the sound of a Manhattan-bound 4 train arriving, and made it, drenched and gasping into an almost empty car, the doors snapping shut behind me, a mere five minutes after leaving my well-beloved Q train riders. My thought about them in that moment: Suckers! See ya!
Postscript: Had I wanted to call into work to tell them I was running late, I would have had only a two-thirds chance of finding a working phone. Maybe if Verizon would stop paying that smug "Test Man" character to ride around on a donkey, they could get him working on fixing some of the phones in the subways.
...came they then to a house which was in the sun-baked south, and far it was from the blessedness of mass transit, and bright were the dwellings there with vinyl siding, and the morning sun mounted in the sky like a proud warrior who had been unfortunately set on fire.
And yet they saw that the house was of brick, and upon a quiet street upon which children played and they said to one another, let us go in.
And they beheld therein a Bad Renovation, and lo there were new cheap-shit wooden floors laid down, and crappy cabinets hung. And they went upstairs wherein a senseless division of space had been created by a blind fool, that a windowless "den or computer area" might be brought into life. And lo, upon the top floor, a tiny studio for a tenant had been outfitted with an extravagant wood-burning stove. And everywhere were the Fruits of Stupidity and Poor Taste.
And they left there and they wept, for the house was of brick, and it had a backyard of the kind that is called Cute.
And they left there and they took them to a house on a Major Thoroughfare that was for sale by owner, and the owner was a man of great energy and wisdom, and they heard much of his lore of plumbing, and of drainage, and of landscape, and of boilers and of roofs. And his tales of fixing-up did lift their spirits and cheer them greatly. And they left him with a happy heart, although his house was just too damn expensive and on a Noisy Street.
And they came then to a third house and entered a small room for living where yea, the ceiling was low, and lo, they were taken to the kitchen, where the ceiling was really low, and they were shown a bathroom where by the craft of men or devils the drop ceiling had been cunningly made to be so low that perhaps it had originally been a gnome's workshop; and yea, upstairs the Hippie Owner was waiting, and he was like unto Derek Smalls of Spinal Tap, as played by Harry Shearer, except even more like unto a dwarf. And there was in that place a very large and silent man who did not identify himself, but played at Microsoft Flight Simulator with heroic concentration. And the Hippie Owner did show them his attic "fantasy space" which was painted black with red lights and flourescent stars and outfitted with a million CDs and a mixing board and microphone.
And in that place a small joke about pirate radio stations was made in all innocence, and lo, the Hippie Owner did reveal that pirate radio was his great love, and how a combination of low power and no cursing will keep the FCC off your back, because it's all about respect. And there came then a silence, and they left that place...
According to Frederico D.B. Wondrich, our consulting professor of potables, the recipe for what we now know as the Margarita appears in 1937 in a hard-to-find British cocktail-recipe book, under a name which spoke more of Andalusia and Hemingway than of Mexico and shakers of salt.
What romantic Spanish figure is invoked in the Margarita's original monicker?
Bonus Points: What lesser-known drink (based on quite similar ingredients) is named after a Pulitzer-winning novel?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a copy of The Seagram's Bartending Guide, bequeathed to me by a thoughtful liquor-marketing executive after a surreal month temping for the people who brought you "The Captain Was Here."
George Gurley sez "Hide your feet!"
There's something both hilarious and horrible about this piece (which smacks a little bit of Phillip Weiss's brand of it's-about-my-neuroses journalism, only with a working sense of humor). While it seems at first glance more LA than New York to me -- body display as fashion that reveals a hidden and unspoken hierarchy of appearance that can be adjusted to any level, that's perhaps prejudicial, my desire to deflect its measurement of the kiddie-pool depth of local culture I swim in. It's a funny bit, of course, but for all that shudderingly revelatory of our reflexive (New York? American? Media-Class? Age-of-MTV?) need to combine spectation with anxiety. Perhaps, for the urban person in 2002, our sense of place in the world (I opine gaseously) has become so fluid, so indistinguishable from that of others, so contingent, that we are now given to seeking out the signs of our place in the Order of Things with increasingly hysterical attentiveness? Yes?
Or no. Maybe Mr. Gurley was just desperate for a story.
Matt sent this to me with a note saying "This is long but pretty good." It's not that long, and it's very good. Not that you didn't know most of what the writer says; not that you don't feel the alarm every time you read about the DMCA and its almost comically obvious array of bad consequences every time you are faced with them; but the note of alarm here from someone other than a devotee of open-source software or an early fan of Napster; someone who can point to the way the university culture has been wrong-footed, very badly -- that note of alarm is worth paying attention to one more time. Because the previous alarms aren't bringing the police.
In 1948, Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski began working on a carving of a famous historical figure that, when completed, would be one of the tallest freestanding sculptures in the world. It is an equestrian statue, which when completed is to be more than 3 times as tall as the Statue of Liberty. Its subject was not an American citizen. The likeness is also said to be more symbolic than realistic.
Ziolkowski died in 1982, but a private foundation carries on his work (they've only gotten as far as the face). You can support the cause by ordering a DVD called "The Fine Art of Drilling and Blasting" which apparently goes into some detail about the technical side of "mountain carving."
Who is the figure the statue represents?
No Googling, please. First correct answer posted to comments wins a copy of Edna McGuire's valuable 1945 work of scholarship, Glimpses into the Long-Ago.
