Sugar Oscar

 

A friend answering phones got a call for "Sonia." -- (People just call and ask for first names, now...)

He asked how are you spelling "Sonia" --

The caller paused and said, (probably from somewhere in the Punjab), "sugar, Oscar, November, India, Alba."

That was a little bit surprising -- it was a new way of doing the --

"S as in Sam, M as in mom, I as in itinerant (I don't know!!), T as in Thomas, H as in heavenly."

This bold new generation has dropped the "as in" -- just like they dropped the "the" before Facebook....

Alba.  Did he mean Jessica Alba?

Google tells us Alba is the Scottish Gaelic name for Scotland.

The "sugar-Oscar-November-India-Alba" also reminded me of the infamous scene in Friends where the interviewer asks how to spell Phoebe and is met with this answer:

"Oh, OK -- P as in Phoebe

H as in hee-bee

O as in Obie

E as in ee-bee

B as in be-bee

and

E as in -- 'Ello there, mate!'"

Friends humor -- where it's outlandishly bizarre nonsense, but yet it doesn't not land.

It's the unexpectedness, and the all-in silliness of the delivery.

And the overall art-work.  The power of that and the audience's buy-in.

Friends was lightning-in-a-bottle.

-30-

maybe you need a tune-up

 

a poem for Lawrence Kasdan

_________________________________

the one great noir film

to always come back to

Great beyond what seemed possible

at the time

Great to see the chimes

(see the chimes?)

(I want to hear them...)

Great to smash the window

with a lawn chair

as an overture to intimacy

The ocean nearby,

and the beach,

and the visiting husband

who's gone but not dead

Dark nights

hot days

----------------------------------------

-30-

the prettiest ones we found came from West Virginia

 

        There's a 14-minute segment of Mrs. Kennedy's White House Tour televised for the American people in 1962, on You Tube.

At 10:03 she shows us, and tells us the John Adams benediction -- ...may none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof...

At 7:10 she talks about the glasses they found from West Virginia...

(A couple of times I thought she was talking about a steak dinner, but then realized she was saying, "State Dinner."...)

Play for yourself two things from You Tube:

1st

"Jacqueline Kennedy's White House Tour"

uploader:  ABC News

and then,

2nd

The Proclaimers  (500 Miles).

when I wake up --

well, I know I'm gonna be...

-30-

the facebook

 

John Adams' White House Benediction

The Washington Post had an article today -- an Opinion piece, rather -- titled, 

"What would a 2024 Trump coup look like?  A new paper offers a worrying answer."

One of the Reader Comments said,

----------------------- "Somehow the guys who wrote the Constitution and built this type of never-before-done govt had this naive notion that all who served in govt would be honorable, or that there would be enough of the honorable so as to keep the scum from screwing it all up."

When I read this, I thought about two things.

1 was a famous benediction which the second U.S. President, John Adams, wrote in a letter to his wife:

"I Pray Heaven To Bestow The Best Of Blessings On This House and All that shall hereafter Inhabit it.  May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof."

These words were engraved in the mantel of the State Dining Room.  Jacqueline Kennedy highlighted this during her Tour of the White House on CBS in 1962.

        The second thing I thought of when I read that Comment was --

Last week I heard or read where someone said, "Social media was a good idea, but people ruin everything."

People ruin everything.

This could be said to be true of other things besides social media--

religion

political parties

representative democracy.

_________________________ As I had been contemplating social media at the back of my mind, when I checked Netflix today and the 2010 movie The Social Network, about how Mark Zuckerberg started what used to be called "the facebook," was on, I watched.

They show in the movie how someone says to just call it "Facebook" -- "it's cleaner."

(Similar to--

'The Saturday When the Rabbi Went Hungry'

vs.

Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry)

---------------------

The screenwriter of The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin, also wrote Charlie Wilson's War.

-30-

winter ideas

 

-30-

Play It as It Lays

 

After typing out an excerpt from a Joan Didion book yesterday, I had to ask, What does the word etiology mean?

online definition

etiology

noun

1.  The cause, set of causes, or manner of causation of a disease or condition.

"a group of distinct diseases with different etiologies"

2.  The investigation or attribution of the cause or reason for something, often expressed in terms of historical or mythical explanation.

_____________________________________

Okay.

But -- what does etiology mean?

--------------------------------------------------------

As I have been reading The Art of X-Ray Reading, by Roy Peter Clark, it makes you notice different things when you read...In yesterday's Didion paragraph, where the word "dark" is used three different times in the same sentence:

--------------------- The place is physically dark, dark like the negative of a photograph, dark like an X-ray:  the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence. -------------------

Two of the "darks" are right together, separated only by a comma.  (I think I'm catching on! -- call Roy Peter Clark!) -- dark, dark like the negative of a photograph, dark like an X-ray...

        Hey, there's another coincidence (or connection?), Joan wrote "dark like an X-ray" -- and Clark's book is about "X-Ray reading."...

        (We're going to need a lasso and some horses to "round up" all these words and word-relationships.)

____________________________________________

        Another thing I noticed because of the "X-ray reading" was when the Texas chair-throwing rabbi news-story was giving me a "call-back" to those Kemelman book titles.

They are great titles, i-m-o, because there's power in the arrangement of the words.  They are unforgettable titles -- they grab the reader.

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry

Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home

Monday the Rabbi Took Off

Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red

Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet

Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out

----------------------- Why are they powerful?  Partly because there are words omitted -- "the" and "when."

'The Friday when the Rabbi Slept Late'

'The Saturday when the Rabbi Went Hungry'

More complete, as sentences (or -- phrases) -- but less powerful.

When we drop those two words, the book titles sound more like what journalist Tina Brown calls "the vernacular of the street" --

Monday the Rabbi Took Off

Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out.

And by losing the "The" at the beginning, it becomes more immediate, more arresting.

The titles sound more tough, this way, like The Sopranos.

Saturday Tony Didn't Kill Nobody.

No,

Saturday the Capo Made Lasagne

No...

Saturday the Capo Bowed Out.

        Yes, maybe more like that.

_____________________________________

_______________________________________

The New York Times had an article on Joan Didion's passing, and her body of work, and her life -- some Reader Comments:

Finn McCool

Boston

------------------ Please go back and rewrite this and include Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.  Notable essay collections from a notable essayist.  If we told ourselves stories in order to live, let's at least get the names of the stories down.

Sally

California

------------- Just read Joan Didion died.  What a loss!  She lived long enough to chronicle so much, and with such poise and feeling.

Lonnie Anaheim

NYC

------------ Life changes in an instant.

Ralph Petrillo

Nyc

------------------------ She was the best of the 20th century.  Clear, concise, deliberate, and the ability to lead the reader to an intellectual clarity of what is actually occurring.  Didion spared no punches.

Paladin

New Jersey

------------------------------------- She, indeed, played it like it laid.

Joe Gentile

New York, NY

---------------------- What a phenomenal talent.

Alex

Down Here on Earth

------------------ Never a smokey drive on PCH to surf in offshore Santa Anas or warm reckless night out amidst the devil winds when I didn't reflect on Joan Didion's ability to capture LA's physical and psychological essence.  

Gotta thank my English teacher for turning me on to her perfectly composed atmospherics.  It would be a crime to leave STB out of any LA kid's syllabus.  

Godspeed Señora.

-30-

suspended in a precarious emulsion

 

-------------------- [excerpt from South and West, by Joan Didion] ---------------------------------------- In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology.  

The place is physically dark, dark like the negative of a photograph, dark like an X-ray:  the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence.  

The crypts above ground dominate certain vistas.  

In the hypnotic liquidity of the atmosphere all motion slows into choreography, all people on the street move as if suspended in a precarious emulsion, and there seems only a technical distinction between the quick and the dead.  -------------------------- [end / excerpt]

________________________________

How can one comment on this?

(Feel like paraphrasing Steve Martin, saying in exaggerated tones, 

"Well, ex - cuuuuuse me!")

And THAT.  Is how she got to be Joan Didion.

She passed on, two days before Christmas, age 87.

-30-

proper conduct

 

_______________________

references

-------------------

^^ the Hora:  Jewish wedding dance

_________________________________

^^ Clue -- a board game where players solve a murder story of "who-dunnit" --

The answers tell who is the perpetrator, what weapon did they use, and in which room of the mysterious mansion was the deed done.  

For example:

Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick

or,

Professor Plum in the billiard room with the lead pipe

____________________________________

^^ In the 1960s English professor Harry Kemelman began writing a mystery series of books where a rabbi solves the puzzle.  Titles --

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry

Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home

Monday the Rabbi Took Off...etc.

_________________________________

________________________________

___________________________

        Yesterday there was a story in the news where a British Pakistani citizen armed with a pistol took four people hostage in a synagogue in Texas.

After an hours-long siege, the rabbi signaled the remaining two hostages to make a break for it, and he threw a chair at the gunman to distract him.

----------------------------------------------

reader comments on SLATE --

*       "Have a seat."

*       Is it legal in Texas for a British citizen to possess a gun?  On the one hand, they hate four-ners.  On the other hand, they love guns.

*       Saturday the Rabbi Slung Chairs

*       "That's my boy!"         --Bobby Knight

*       I wonder if he had a permit for that chair.

*       I'm confused isn't that just how people do the hora in Texas?

*       Anyone else think that from now on throwing a chair at someone should be called "Doing the Texas Hora"?

*       "Chair-ity begins at home."

                             Rabbis are always willing to teach a lesson.

*       So much for the nebbishy rabbi trope!  Perhaps chair throwing will become a thing.

                        Seriously though, that was awesome!

*       Love this story!  Love this Rabbi.  So, there's a Jewish Principle, "Derech Eretz Kadma L'Torah," which speaks to "proper conduct".

While this isn't really that... I say the Rabbi showed the man, Proper Conduct~!

*       A good guy with a chair.

*       "The only thing that stops a bad-guy with a gun is a Rabbi with a chair!"

*       It was the Rabbi, in the Synagogue, with the chair.

_________________________________________

reader comments, Washington Post --

*       A good guy with a chair ...

*       Rabbis, apparently, can bring a chair to a gunfight.

*       No one so far has asked just how a recent foreign visitor, on a tourist visa, got a deadly firearm so quickly.

               Oh.  I forgot.  This is America.  We're flooded with guns.  So we can be "free".

*       The way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a Rabbi with a chair, apparently.

*       As long as the West allow these people to flow into their countries like refugees, you're going to have problems like these.  Look how fast this foreigner can seek weapons in America, it's mind boggling.

*       I live in the area and have met Rabbi Charlie on several occasions.  His actions in this situation didn't surprise me.  He truly is a mensch.

*       That's good to hear.  what a story

*       What can stop a bad man with a gun?  A good rabbi with a chair.

*       Where (and how) did he get a gun?  Did he fly over from the U.K. with it?

    *    -------------------- No.  He would not have been allowed a gun on an international flight to the US on a travel visa.

        The most likely explanation is he acquired the gun in a "private sale."

                        *       It was Texas.  He probably bought it from his cab driver on the way to the synagogue.

*       Liberal Redneck

                        Good for the rabbi.  Mensch !

*       Akram brought a gun to a chairfight and lost.

*       Good guy with a chair saves the day.

*       The good Rabbi is onto something.  Maybe this will start a new trend where Texans pack folding chairs instead of guns.

*       It takes a good rabbi with a chair...

-30-

boy, if life were only like this!

 

        As I'm reading through The Art of X-Ray Reading, by Roy Peter Clark, I find myself thinking of the scene in Annie Hall when Annie and Alvy have just met that day and she invites him up to her apartment for a refreshment and conversation.

In the X-Ray Reading book, the author counts words, commas sometimes, syllables--analyzes all kinds of stuff that I would not have thought of -- and I replay the Woody Allen scene in my mind where he asks her,

So, did you shoot the photographs in there, or what?

Annie

Yeah, yeah, I sorta dabble around, you know...

Alvy

They're - they're - they're wonderful, you know.  They have ... they have, uh - a - a quality.

Annie

Well, I-I-I would-I would like to take a serious photography course soon.

Alvy

Photography's interesting, 'cause, you know, it's-it's a new art form, and a, uh, a set of aesthetic criteria have not emerged yet.

Annie

Aesthetic criteria?  You mean, whether it's, uh, good photo or not?

Alvy

The-the medium enters in as a condition of the art form itself.  That's-

Annie

Well, well, I ... to me-I ... I mean, it's-it's-it's all instinctive, you know.  I mean, I just try to uh, feel it, you know?  I try to get a sense of it and not think about it so much.

--------------------------------

When I'm writing, I'm not very much like Roy Peter Clark, I'm more like Annie Hall.

-30-

troublesome words

 

----------------------------- [excerpt from Max Perkins:  Editor of Genius, by A. Scott Berg] ------------------------  ...Innumerable legends had sprung up about him, most of them rooted in truth.  Everyone in [the] class had heard at least one breathless version of how Perkins had discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald; or of how Scott's wife, Zelda, at the wheel of Scott's automobile, had once driven the editor into Long Island Sound; or of how Perkins had made Scribners lend Fitzgerald many thousands of dollars and had rescued him from his breakdown.  

It was said that Perkins had agreed to publish Ernest Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, sight unseen, then had to fight to keep his job when the manuscript arrived because it contained off-color language.  

Another favorite Perkins story concerned his confrontation with his ultraconservative publisher, Charles Scribner, over the four-letter words in Hemingway's second novel, A Farewell to Arms.  Perkins was said to have jotted the troublesome words he wanted to discuss -- shit, fuck, and piss -- on his desk calendar, without regard to the calendar's heading:  "Things to Do Today."  

Old Scribner purportedly noticed the list and remarked to Perkins that he was in great trouble if he needed to remind himself to do those things.  ------------------------------------- [end / excerpt]

-30-

well, I've been haunted in my sleep...

 

Thomas Wolfe, American novelist

        I got excited to learn that a movie was made from one of my favorite books:  Max Perkins:  Editor of Genius, by A. Scott Berg.  I read it the summer between freshman and sophomore year of college -- during lunch breaks at work, on the trolley and subway...Rolling Stones on the radio...I've been walking Central Park

Singin' after dark

People think I'm crazy...

Maxwell Perkins worked for Scribner's publishing company in New York City, beginning in 1910.  In the 1920s and '30s, he worked with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, among others.

        Thomas Wolfe was a Southern novelist (not to be confused with Tom Wolfe, another Southern writer).

___________________________

Thomas Wolfe

born in Asheville, North Carolina

October 3, 1900 - September 15, 1938

    Look Homeward, Angel

     You Can't Go Home Again

    The Web and the Rock

------------------------------------------

Tom Wolfe

born in Richmond, Virginia

March 2, 1930 - May 14, 2018

    The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

    The Right Stuff

    Radical Chic

_________________________________

The one who is part of Max Perkins' story is Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolina one.

        Anyway, they made a movie based on biography of a book editor -- it came out in 2016 -- I know how I missed it, my attention was all pulled into the election stuff....

The Guardian ran two reviews of the film, which is titled Genius.  Both reviews were unfavorable.  (How many times would I like to remind these people:  complaining about the movie is not the same as reviewing it...?  When the reviewer just starts saying, this happened, then that happened, and then they said this...and there is a derisive sneer behind each phrase and sentence and topic--I start to think, Why are they even writing this?

        Answer:  because it's their job....)

Maybe they are right, I thought, then I went on Amazon to the DVD of the movie and started reading customer ratings -- most of them love it!  Ironic, because sometimes customer reviews on Amazon can be a whole-nother level of dumpster-fire....

        (The more information we get, the less understanding we have.)

I desperately want to get the DVD and watch it, but first I have to become desperate enough to find a DVD-player to buy that isn't a piece of crap.  They make those things all over the world, and they don't think we necessarily need them to work....

(21st-century problems, I guess...)

-30-

mysterious and thrilling

 

Joan Didion

I've been reading The Art of X-Ray Reading, a book by Roy Peter Clark.  He includes a passage from A Farewell to Arms, a novel set in Italy during World War I:

------------------------- [excerpt from A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway] ----------------------------

                        In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.  In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.  

Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.  The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

------------------------------- [end, excerpt]

Mr. Clark writes,

------------------------------ When an unfinished novel of Hemingway's came out in 1998, Joan Didion wrote about it in The New Yorker magazine.  It was a dazzling essay that began with the excerpt from Hemingway quoted above.  What follows is her remarkable X-ray reading of the text, not from the perspective of a critic or scholar but that of a fellow writer.  She is clearly looking deep beneath the surface of the text, and she does it in a single long paragraph:

---------------------- [excerpt, Didion] --------------- That paragraph, which was published in 1929, bears examination:  four deceptively simple sentences, one hundred and twenty-six words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them, at twelve or thirteen, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange one hundred and twenty-six such words myself.  

Only one of the words has three syllables.  Twenty-two have two.  The other hundred and three have one.  Twenty-four of the words are "the," fifteen are "and."  There are four commas.  

The liturgical cadence of the paragraph derives in part from the placement of the commas (their presence in the second and fourth sentences, their absence in the first and third), but also from the repetition of "the" and of "and," creating a rhythm so pronounced that the omission of "the" before the word "leaves" in the fourth sentence 

("and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling") 

casts exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition, a foreshadowing of the story to come, the awareness that the author has already shifted his attention from late summer to a darker season.  

The power of the paragraph, offering as it does the illusion but not the fact of specificity, derives precisely from this kind of deliberate omission, from the tension of withheld information.  In the late summer of what year? what river, what mountains, what troops?

---------------------------- [end, Didion excerpt]

Clark:  When something is overdesigned, we often criticize it as being too busy or cluttered.  The same is true of the arts.  First it was Miles Davis and then Tony Bennett who preached the virtues of knowing which musical notes to leave out.  Didion is so tuned in to Hemingway that she can see the small deletions, which can create a big effect.

_______________________________

_______________________________

Rolling Stones songwriter and guitarist Keith Richards talks about doing something similar with music:

-------------------------- [excerpt, Richards - Life] ------------------ So we sat there in the cold, dissecting tracks for as long as the meter held out.  A new Bo Diddley record goes under the surgical knife.  Have you got that wah-wah?  What were the drums playing, how hard were they playing...what were the maracas doing?  You had to take it all apart and put it back together again, from your point of view.

-30-

how to communicate with your public

 

center:  Peter Bogdanovich

lower left:  Barbra Streisand in What's Up, Doc?

upper left:  Cybill Shepherd in The Last Picture Show

upper right:  Dorothy Stratten and John Ritter in They All Laughed

lower right:  Tatum O'Neal and Ryan O'Neal in Paper Moon

For the Peter Bogdanovich Experience (what I am calling it) go on You Tube and watch video titled,

Peter Bogdanovich on His Career, Orson Welles, Cary Grant and Hollywood - 2017

uploader:  Turner Classic Movies

It is entertaining.

--------------------------------- Today, I look at the news and Bob Saget has passed on, at the age of 65.

Something I didn't know about him:  he had like a two-track career, clean and dirty.

On mainstream television starring in Full House, and hosting America's Funniest Videos he was G-rated, but his live stand-up in clubs was, according to  reader comments on several sites, quite "blue."

That reminded me of Redd Foxx -- we used to know him from Sanford and Son -- my dad would say, "He's like a black Archie Bunker!" -- just astounded, lol.

Somebody's older brother told someone in my class and the word went around that there were record albums of Redd Foxx doing very dirty jokes and stories.

Track one.

and Track two.

-30-

Amen, Amen

 

Peter Bogdanovich

1939 - 2022

        I keep wanting to get back and discuss my original subject, Smash His Camera, documentary about photographer Ron Galella.  But then people influential in the entertainment business keep dropping dead on me, and taking my attention.

        It has been three in the past week:

Betty White      99 years

Peter Bogdanovich      82 years

Sidney Poitier      94 years

We have chatted here about the wonderful Betty White, and now we must recommend, for a little Sidney Poitier, type in on You Tube

Sidney Poitier, Amen

and you can hear a good song.

-------------------------------- Peter Bogdanovich was a director, a film historian, and he did some acting as well -- notably (for me, anyway) as a psychiatrist on "The Sopranos."

        The shrink whom Tony Soprano sees, Dr. Melfi, in turn goes for counseling herself, with Bogdanovich's character.

________________________

3 key movies by Peter Bogdanovich:

The Last Picture Show   (1971)

What's Up, Doc?   (1972)

Paper Moon   (1973)

Paper Moon can be watched right now on Amazon Prime.

______________________________________

Smash His Camera adds new information, for me, and also brings back memories.

I first learned of Ron Galella's existence when I was junior-high age -- in Rootstown, Ohio, I was going to go downstairs and at the top of the stairs where the railing ended in a flat surface like a little shelf, there was a magazine with a photograph of Jackie Onassis on the front.

I picked it up and looked up the story and read it.  It was about a photographer named Ron Galella in New York City who would take Mrs. Onassis's picture when she was out and about.  And she didn't want him to -- wanted him to stop.  And they were going to court over it.

I remember not really knowing what to think about that.

And I wondered how to pronounce the name Galella -- and then realized there's really only one way...  But it was unusual, to me, then -- an Italian name.

In Smash His Camera, a British guy comments, "His name is Galella.  And he lives in New Jersey.  And when you get to his house you look, and you go, 'My God -- it's the Sopranos!'"

Near the beginning of Smash, there's film of Ron Galella with his wife, cutting a hole in the hedge by Katharine Hepburn's driveway so that he can see through it with his camera to take a picture of her when she comes out to get in her car and be driven to a NYC theater where she's appearing in a play.

        They are "lying in wait," as the expression goes.

Television host David Frost is narrating the proceedings -- he says, with his English accent, "We asked Mr. Galella if harassing a 71-year-old woman in this fashion was a decent way to go about making a living..."

The photog is blocked from his shot when Hepburn's chauffeur moves the car up.  Galella then races to the theater to be there when she alights -- she walks, carrying a huge umbrella turned sideways to block his view of everything but her feet.  He gets a good picture of the umbrella and the feet.

        And he isn't disappointed -- he says, "You see, she holds the umbrella to block me.  That's her personality!  That's interesting!"

-30-

"it's fun to stay at the Y - M - C - A..."

 

1970s 

42nd Street, New York City

Photographer Ron Galella's New York...

-30-

thank you for being a friend

 

Betty White:

        On You Tube, lots of videos and compilations.

        On Netflix, there's a documentary titled Betty White.  Made in 2018, it's available to watch until January 11th.

There is a whole series of videos on You Tube, of Ms. White's appearances on a talk show hosted by a Scottish man with a prominent accent.  Quite funny.

Carl Reiner appears in the Netflix doc -- love him.

------------------------- Betty White quote:

"I learned it from my animal friends.  Kindness and consideration of somebody besides yourself.  I think that keeps you feeling young.  I really do."

-30-

everyone loves Betty White

 

Betty White

birthplace:  Oak Park, Illinois - (same as the novelist Ernest Hemingway) 

January 17, 1922 - December 31, 2021

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

The Golden Girls

Hot In Cleveland

...and more

She had quite a career, and such a unique energy and voice.

-30-