Pizza at the Diner
Yes, it’s one of those days that’s Bleat-poor but link-rich. Fridays sometimes turn out that way. Thursday had the spirit and mood of Friday, though – I’m working at home on Friday, as I did often in the now-distant Golden Age – but it didn’t include any of the things I usually do Friday, like redesign sites, scan stuff, watch the B&W World movie, and such. As I’ve said before, I love Fridays because nothing is due on Saturday. Ever since the Bleat began, I’ve had a weekday deadline at the end of the night. I wonder if I would have started this if I’d known what it would mean. Probably. Was amused to read that Kids Today have stopped blogging, more or less; they’ve moved the blurtage over to Facebook, which makes much more sense. The web is the Great Heaving Sea; Facebook is an auditorium. Tumblr is a flea-market. Blogs will either be for writers, or communities gathered around a particular ideology or subject, or ace aggregators who can spit out 30 unique links a day. I can’t tell you how many times I hit a link on Twitter, only to find it’s a link to a site that links to someone else’s site that copies something someone else said, then says “these people are insane” or “that’s a point more people should be making.” Drives me NUTS.
But I expect some people have set up automation routines that spit tweets when they update. They’re not alone. Today at the paper I was amused to see our website note that unemployment had gone up, “unexpectedly.” This is something of a jape in certain circles; any bad economic news about joblessness or housing seems to be “unexpected.” Since I sit right next to the tireless crack web-conductors who mediate the gush of the wires, I noted how “unexpected” is a rather . . . perennial term these days, ot derided for its inevitability, and doesn’t it constitute a wee bit, a tiny dram, of editorializing, no? Because in the back of my mind I’m thinking there will be bloggers who will say the paper is part of the TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED cabal that furthers this meme. As was explained: the program automatically scrapes the AP heads, and puts them on the page – and since AP constantly updates stories, any attempt to remove “unexpectedly” from one story would be countermanded in a tick, as soon as AP sent along another version. I did not know that. I learn things every day. Which is why it’s always amusing, and somewhat depressing, to hear people on the gauche and the droit make Wide Sweeping Assumptions about things they see on the site.
It’s excusable from people who’ve never worked in the media, but amusing from those who have. Especially if they’ve never worked in an actual daily paper.
Okay, I’m rambling. Here are the links for the day.
The newspaper column, HERE.
The Diner! HERE. (It will explain the Pizza Hut matchbook above.)
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to listen to Beethoven’s 6th and replace some halogen bulbs. Be right back.
Back. As highminded as that sounded, it’s like this: I am writing in the kitchen on a laptop whose iTunes I barely stocked, and haven’t touched for two years. Good thing: the more choices, the more you’re paralyzed. This is okay, but I could be listening to something else. The laptop has the Fantasia soundtrack, which hits that rare nexus of childhood / Disney / Classical / Thirties, and is hence occasionally irresistible. The Beethoven led into “The Dance of the Hours,” playing now; it’s fascinating to hear the Fantasound mix bouncing between the two speakers on either side of my hands. I love that sequence – low comedy and middlebrow music, combined with backgrounds that look like a deserted vision of the World’s Fair: ostriches and alligators and elephants, oh my. But since this was the first time I heard the music, and since I listened to it again and again on the soundtrack (yes: bought it as a teen, at Broadway Music, a record store that inhabited a former movie theater where I’d first seen “Fantasia” during a previous re-re-release; the theater was a porn house that periodically showed Disney flicks as some odd form of penance. The soundtrack album was beautifully packaged, the disks thicker than usual, the paper sleeves so creamy you could slide out the album without a single static pop) I came to expect the real music to be the same as the edited or enhanced Disney versions. There’s a timpani thump in the “Dance of the Hours” sequence to indicate a hippo has fallen on her arse. If I’m listening to a version of the piece performed by an orchestra, I know where the thump is, I expect it, and I usually whap an imaginary mallet.
If my neighbors are watching from across the broad yard of Jasperwood, they just saw me imitate Chernobog at his moment of triumph in “Night on Bald Mountain.” The last part of the piece is really Sympathy for the Devil; you feel for the guy. Dawn is a buzzkill when you’re uber-evil. Then the genius of “Ave Maria,” which I will always remember as the source of one of an embarrassing moment: standing in the Pantheon on Rome, arguing with a high-school classmate about whether Schubert or Schumann wrote it. She was right. I was wrong. I will always remember that I was wrong, in the Pantheon.
I am damned certain I have written all this before, how the movie begins with primordial abstractions, ends in divinity, and evaporates in the last bright brazing sunset of the last summer night of 1939. As much as it may pain some to admit it, the end of the Old World was directed by Walt.
Actually made it down this far? Congrats, and thanks! Now head back up and hit the links, and I’ll see you Monday.
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So You Said
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Or a Husker Du?
My Great-grandmother had a cabinet like what is shown in the Sears catalog. In Indiana they are called “Hoosiers”, and if they are in decent enough shape, bring a pretty good price at auction.
Hoosier Sifter WBAGNFARB
The Butt Boys?…snicker
The “Hoosier Daddies” is already taken.
There also a Bumpass Hell in Cali – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_areas_in_Lassen_Volcanic_National_Park#Bumpass_Hell
And the best video store in the universe just might be located in San Diego – http://www.kenvideo.net/ (an honest to goodness FAMILY business)
and conveniently located right next to (though not related to) -
http://www.landmarktheatres.com/market/SanDiego/KenCinema.htm
Haven’t been to either lately since I’ve moved a bit too far away in the county
Ain’t it always the way? I was listening to a Goon Show from 1954 the other day, and I thought a Peter Sellers character name would be a great web alias. Sure enough, somebody is already using it, though without punctuation:
Avery “Tom” Deacon-Harry.
“[A]ny attempt to remove “unexpectedly” from one story would be countermanded in a tick, as soon as AP sent along another version. I did not know that.”
You could call it an unexpected discovery.
But I suppose that would be redundant, wouldn’t it…?
Well, dang. Who knew there was both a Pantheon and a Parthenon?
Incidentally there will be a Pantathon to help raise awareness and money for dogs left in hot vehicles.
James, The foundation of Chicago style deep dish pizze rests on 3 pillars: Gino’s, Uno, and Lou Malnati’s.
The story is that it was invented at Uno, but the inventor was Rudy Malnati (father of Lou), who was the chef there. Gino’s (the Gino’s you mentioned was Gino’s East, which is related, but not the same) was founded one year after Uno, and before Due.
Man, I miss the Pizzeria Unos they used to have out West here.
I didn’t know that Sears made a Hoosier type cabinet. They still seem to be plentiful back east, but you hardly ever find them in California. My Grandmother’s house was built in 1938 and already had built in kitchen cabinets and a red, black and yellow version of that linoleum.
I miss that house. It was art deco heaven.
@juanito – John Davey: Would someone go up to their Husker Du, open a door, and say, “Hey- who ate all the Frusen Glädjé?”
I think an antique Hoosier cabinet in good shape would fetch a good price at auction.
RE: Today’s 100 Mysteries mystery–I think James has uncovered, or, considering how dead the dialogue is, disinterred the inspiration for Keith Jackson’s famous broadcast delivery.
Imagine young Keith at the movies in 1938, mouthing along, “Whoa (Nellie), let me do the talking.”
The Kellogg’s bird picture promotion had its low point when they were advertised on radio’s “The Adventures of Superman” – even Bud Collyer couldn’t hide his embarrassment at promoting them in the Kellogg’s Pep cereal commercials.
Schubert, Schumann. What’s the difference? One died really young, and the other went completely bonkers.
Actually, you could have pulled this one off. Schumann “quoted” the Schubert “Ave Maria” at the very end of his song, “Widmung,” or “Dedication.” This piece is most often heard in the Liszt piano transcription. You know it. I’m sure you do.
Of course, the idea that you were having this discussion with a girl in the Pantheon is already sad enough. Had you delved this deeply into the weeds, it would have been just pitiful.
Regards.
Here it is! The Eddie Cantor number from “Roman Scandals.” I KNEW I saw it somewhere before!
Here’s Jaime Weinman explaining why you have to see this number:
“The strange thing about the number is that as it progresses and gets more and more surreal and bizarre — the usual pattern of a Berkeley number — it almost seems to be rebelling against itself. First it betrays one of the rules of a blackface number by having the dancers actually notice that Cantor is a white guy in blackface, and get quite angry at him for it. Then the two groups of dancers, black and white, who were originally separated from each other, join together and team up against their common enemy: Cantor, the white guy pretending to be black, the man telling them all how they should look. They use one of the beauty treatments they had to go through to “keep young and beautiful” as an instrument of torture against Cantor, pumping their fists in revolutionary style.”
“I doubt Berkeley actually intended this to be some kind of act of revolution against the traditional blackface number or girlie number. But he would follow his crazy ideas wherever they took him, and that’s where this particular idea seems to take him: the chorus girls take over the number, stage a coup, and kill the star. ”
It really is a bizarre clip:
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2009/09/non-offensive-subtext-in-busby-berkeley.html
By the way, Jaime is now talking about the Benny Goodman clip from the Hollywood movie you just discussed recently. Are you two mates on the same listserv? Do you coordinate movies to talk about?
The FDR time pieces. “The Dome on the White House” huh?
@ Lou Shumaker:
Woww. Very very strange. And more proof than ever that Busby was one of the towering visionary geniuses of his century.
(Was that little Billy Barty in blackface???????)
When oh when will the Diner return to Itunes? I lost nearly 20 pounds listening to the Diner on my Ipod while walking, and now I’m getting all puffy again.
@ Lou Shumaker:
I agree with Jaime Weinman. In this clip there seems to be some great subconscious working-out of collective cultural guilt here, even while keeping a tone of surreal whimsy.
It makes me admire all participants just a little bit more — even Mr Eddie “anything-for-a-dumb-laff” Cantor.
Wow. VERY interestingly … Eddie Cantor had the spine to oppose racist populist broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930/40s, and to defend/embraace a young Sammy Davis Jr in the 1950s. So you shouldn’t judge a life till you’ve measured the whole thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Cantor
I realize this is weeks later, but having listened to the Diner, and thinking about the problem of the “all-corners pizza”…
Suppose someone took the four corners off of a round pizza, and lined them up in some kind of diamond/oval shape. Could someone take a liiiiittle bit of fresh dough and roll out something in the shape of those four contiguous corners? That way, you could make two cuts, and hey presto – four corners, no rest-of-the-pie to deal with.
And maybe Charlie Brown could finally kick the football, too – triumphant, and not funny at all…