Peacherine Rag

 

The 1970s have been called Hollywood's second golden age:  two modern classics from that era are currently on Netflix:

Play Misty for Me

The Sting

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poem:

life and communication

where do great movies come from?

they happen, like any art,

when someone speaks up

and there's a break in the monotony

and the heard, the seen,

the experienced

stands up and says, "Hey!"

and it's good.

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The Sting has mood-stirring ragtime songs by American composer Scott Joplin (1868 - 1917).

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DJ, just play that song

 

Play Misty for Me is on Netflix, now.

Tap "Play," and even if you don't want to watch the whole movie, just let the music and opening credits play -- the song is terrific!  Clint Eastwood drives a fabulous sports car by the ocean.  The letters' font is playful and artistic.

        Yesterday I was writing here about seeing people in TV shows sit on end tables.  It is bizarre, for sure.  Unless there's something I don't know -- maybe everyone is sitting on tables except for me....

I call them end tables; some people call them side tables, or accent tables.  Thinking about interior design made me remember a book called The Decoration of Houses, by Edith Wharton.

An American, Wharton lived from 1862 to 1937.  She is primarily known as a novelist:  her books include The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The House of Mirth among others.

        She wrote The Decoration of Houses in collaboration with architect Ogden Codman; the book was published in 1897.

-------------------------- [excerpt] ------------------------ 

This quest of artistic novelties would be encouraging were it based on the desire for something better, rather than for something merely different.  The tendency to dash from one style to another, without stopping to analyze the intrinsic qualities of any, has defeated the efforts of those who have tried to teach the true principles of furniture-designing by a return to the best models.  

If people will buy the stuff now offered them as Empire, Sheraton or Louis XVI, the manufacturer is not to blame for making it.  It is not the maker but the purchaser who sets the standard; and there will never be any general supply of better furniture until people take time to study the subject, and find out wherein lies the radical unfitness of what now contents them.

Until this golden age arrives the householder who cannot afford to buy old pieces, or to have old models copied by a skilled cabinet-maker, had better restrict himself to the plainest of furniture, relying for the embellishment of his room upon good bookbindings and one or two old porcelain vases for his lamps.

Concerning the difficult question of color, it is safe to say that the fewer the colors used in a room, the more pleasing and restful the result will be.  A multiplicity of colors produces the same effect as a number of voices talking at the same time.  The voices may not be discordant, but continuous chatter is fatiguing in the long run.  

        Each room should speak with but one voice:  it should contain one color, which at once and unmistakably asserts its predominance, in obedience to the rule that where there is a division of parts one part shall visibly prevail over all the others.

To attain this result, it is best to use the same color and, if possible, the same material, for curtains and chair-coverings.  This produces an impression of unity and gives an air of spaciousness to the room.  When the walls are simply panelled in oak or walnut, or are painted in some neutral tones, such as gray and white, the carpet may contrast in color with the curtains and chair-coverings.  

For instance, in an oak-panelled room crimson curtains and chair-coverings may be used with a dull green carpet, or with one of dark blue patterned in subdued tints; or the color-scheme may be reversed, and green hangings and chair-coverings combined with a plain crimson carpet.

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have I been out of understanding?

 

         Something I noticed while playing episodes of Designing Women from Amazon Prime -- a man from another interior design company walks into their store, bringing with him a book he had borrowed -- he lays the book down on an end table by the sofa, and then -- sits on it!

        Not on the sofa, on the end table! - ?  He lays down the book (which is more like a large, flat magazine or catalogue) on the table, then sits down on top of the book he just returned, on the end table.

What's weird is, I saw this end-table-sitting behavior on another 1980s situation comedy, The Cosby Show.  Don't remember exactly when, but I remember noticing it.

(Maybe terms should be defined.  I don't know if everyone uses the same words for these items -- to me, if you have a sofa and  you're sitting on it, and in front of your knees is a table, that's a coffee table.  If there is a table over to your left, standing by the sofa, then to me that's an end table.

        If there's another table on the other side of the sofa, to your right -- that's another end table.)

Either way, and whatever you call them, these tables are not to be sat upon.  I was real surprised to see that in The Cosby Show -- using an end table like a bench, to sit on, and when I saw the guy on Designing Women do that -- return something he had borrowed and then -- sit on it. -- Really??!  There, it was like a double-offense -- sitting on an end table, and sitting on top of the thing you borrowed and just brought back.

In my world view, end tables are for lamps, magazines, maybe books and perhaps small decorative items.  Coffee tables, pretty much the same, except not lamps.

Sitting on end tables -- is this some kind of anthropological development that occurred during the 1980s?  Is it Hollywood?  When they're filming a TV show they just sit somewhere and don't bother about whether it's realistic?

(how much Puzzle Power does my brain have left...?)

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the night the lights went out in Georgia

 

The 1980s situation-comedy Designing Women is on Amazon Prime, now.

The looks of that era! - below-the-knee skirts, hair in rounded, puffed curls....

The second or third episode of Season 1, they are at a beauty pageant because Suzanne is involved -- judging, or coaching, or something.  In a dressing room, Julia hears someone talking trash about Suzanne:

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Julia:  I'm Julia Sugarbaker, Suzanne Sugarbaker's sister.  I couldn't help overhearing part of your conversation.

Marjorie:  Well I'm sorry.  I didn't know anyone was here.

Julia:  Yes, and I gather from your comments there are a couple of other things you don't know, Marjorie.  For example, you probably didn't know that Suzanne was the only contestant in Georgia pageant history to sweep every category except congeniality, and that is not something the women in my family aspire to anyway.

Or that when she walked down the runway in her swimsuit, five contestants quit on the spot.  Or that when she emerged from the isolation booth to answer the question, "What would you do to prevent war?" she spoke so eloquently of patriotism, battlefields and diamond tiaras, grown men wept.

And you probably didn't know, Marjorie, that Suzanne was not just any Miss Georgia, she was the Miss Georgia.  She didn't twirl just a baton, that baton was on fire.

And when she threw that baton into the air, it flew higher, further, faster than any baton has ever flown before, hitting a transformer and showering the darkened arena with sparks!

And when it finally did come down, Marjorie, my sister caught that baton, and 12,000 people jumped to their feet for sixteen and one-half minutes of uninterrupted thunderous ovation, as flames illuminated her tear-stained face!

And that, Marjorie -- just so you will know -- and your children will someday know -- is the night.  The lights.  Went out.  In Georgia!

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transitory enchanted moment

 

------------------ [F. Scott Fitzgerald - an essay by Lionel Trilling / excerpts] ----------------------------

The root of Fitzgerald's heroism is to be found, as it sometimes is in tragic heroes, in his power of love. ...We feel of him, as we cannot feel of all moralists, that he did not attach himself to the good because this attachment would sanction his fierceness toward the bad -- his first impulse was to love the good, and we know this the more surely because we perceive that he loved the good not only with his mind but also with his quick senses and his youthful pride and desire.

He really had but little impulse to blame, which is the more remarkable because our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.  "Forbearance, good word," is one of the jottings in his notebook.  When it came to blame, he preferred, it seems, to blame himself.  

He even did not much want to blame the world.  Fitzgerald knew where "the world" was at fault.  He knew that it was the condition, the field, of tragedy.  He is conscious of "what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams."  

But he never made out that the world imposes tragedy, either upon the heroes of his novels, whom he called his "brothers," or upon himself.  

        When he speaks of his own fate, he does indeed connect it with the nature of the social world in which he had his early flowering, but he never finally lays it upon that world, even though at the time when he was most aware of his destiny it was fashionable with minds more pretentious than his to lay all personal difficulty whatever at the door of the "social order."  

It is, he feels, his fate -- and as much as to anything else in Fitzgerald, we respond to the delicate tension he maintained between his idea of personal free will and his idea of circumstance:  we respond to that moral and intellectual energy.  "The test of a first-rate intelligence," he said, "is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind, at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

        The power of love in Fitzgerald, then, went hand in hand with a sense of personal responsibility and perhaps created it.

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What underlies all success in poetry, what is even more important than the shape of the poem or its wit of metaphor, is the poet's voice.  It either gives us confidence in what is being said or it tells us that we do not need to listen; and it carries both the modulation and the living form of what is being said.  

In the novel no less than in the poem, the voice of the author is the decisive factor.  We are less consciously aware of it in the novel, and, in speaking of the elements of a novel's art, it cannot properly be exemplified by quotation because it is continuous and cumulative.  

        In Fitzgerald's work the voice of his prose is of the essence of his success.  We hear in it at once the tenderness toward human desire that modifies a true firmness of moral judgment.  It is, I would venture to say, the normal or ideal voice of the novelist.  

It is characteristically modest, yet it has in it, without apology or self-consciousness, a largeness, even a stateliness, which derives from Fitzgerald's connection with tradition and with mind, from his sense of what has been done before and the demands which this past accomplishment makes.

"...I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes -- a fresh, green breast of the new world.  Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."  

        Here, in the well-known passage, the voice is a little dramatic, a little intentional, which is not improper to a passage in climax and conclusion, but it will the better suggest in brief compass the habitual music of Fitzgerald's seriousness.

____________________________

Published in The Liberal Imagination:  Essays on Literature and Society by Lionel Trilling (New York:  The Viking Press, Inc., London:  Martin Seeker & Warburg Limited, 1951)

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make the morning last

 

♫ ♫♫

Slow down, you move too fast

You got to make the morning last

Just kicking down the cobblestones

Looking for fun and feelin' groovy

Ba da da da da da da, feelin' groovy

Hello, lamppost, what'cha knowin'?

I've come to watch your flowers growin' 

Ain't'cha got no rhymes for me?

Doot-in doo-doo, feelin' groovy

Ba da da da da da da, feelin' groovy

I got no deeds to do

No promises to keep

I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep

Let the morning time drop all its petals on me

Life, I love you

All is groovy

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{"The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)"

Simon & Garfunkel}

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even cause more harm than a bandit

 

        The New York Times today had an Opinion article about George Santos, a newly elected member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Long Island.

        One of the Reader Comments was from Harjit Singhrao in San Bruno (a city in California) --

"NYT so obsessed with George Santos lying all politicians lie well known fact even Presidents.  Trump lies all the time.  When anyone becomes a politician they are stupid to the end even cause more harm than a bandit."

Goodness.  That's a Comment that goes straight to the point and back again.  We can take it in our Morning Run.

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On You Tube I listened to some videos where women were "scammed" by men who said they loved them.  Over the Internet.  Some of the people had never even seen the person they were messaging with.  Some had never heard the voice, because they were only texting.

Online Comments advised:  "if he won't Face Time or meet irl, block him!"

A large number of the scammers / lovers had (claimed to have) the same three careers:

doctor

works for NASA

CIA

(?!)

Other favorite careers they use:

in the military

work on an oil rig

--------------------------------- Many Comments, people were saying, How can anyone fall for this?

        But others suggest, the people who get "played" by these schemes are gaining something, too.  It's a fantasy, a distraction, someone paying attention to them.  Maybe it's "for entertainment purposes only."

        And the target can decide how much they want to pay for it, and how long they want to engage.

In other words, they're not really being played, they're participating.

One Comment said, "This lady is not a victim, she's a client."

        It seems like there's an element of addiction, too.  Bing-bing -- a message arrives on their phone....

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