You learn things from putting a child to bed. You learn a lot about robbers and boogiemen. For creatures who sneak around in the crepuscular shadows, they are remarkably sensitive to subtle gradations of illumination. We have dimmers everywhere, so I have learned to calibrate the light just so. Doors are a simpler proposition – either they are closed completely, or they might as well be wide open. If the door is slightly ajar, all sorts of evil can flow into the room. Close it completely, and the robbers are utterly confounded. A knob! Curses! I thought the alarm system was bad enough, but now a knob stands in our way? Let us retreat through the skylight from whence we came, lads.
Cold day. Damned cold, with a mean wind full of hatpins – pure raw winter eternal, laughing at the conceits of spring. In some parts of the country I believe winter dies easy and early; here it goes down like the Third Reich. You can hear it laugh: You like this? I got more! I call it March! I’ve heard people say they don’t like Arizona because everything is so prickly, but the boulevards are like heaps of broken glass studded with razors – slip, fall, put your face in a bank and you come up looking like you shaved with a cheese grater. The sun is getting stronger, but it still feels like it’s just studying us for research purposes. At least we wake in the light and drive home in the light.
Not to repeat endlessly something I posted in two other venues, but:
Obviously, all doors are temporarily closed, until they are temporarily open. There’s a reason for this note, though. Last year we closed off an entrance. FOREVER. It was on the south side of the building; it was the door I always took. In the salad days of the paper – so named for fellow who walked through the newsroom with an enormous bin of tossed lettuce and romaine, doling out croutons from a modified change-dispenser hooked to his belt – we had four entrances. The main door, through which employees, managers, and supplicants seeking to petition the journalists had to pass; the West Entrance, which disgorged the smokers from the ad sales department; the South entrance, which was favored by people who handled classified and transcribed obituaries over the phone, and the East Entrance, favored by promotional people riding down the elevator from fourth. Each compass point had its own Smokers’ Clique, people who’d synced their nicotine needs. When the South entrance was closed, it was because part of the building had been walled up forever, shut off from juice and heat.
This was the entrance I used, and it was a bit morbid to enter and leave by a sign that said OBITUARIES QUIET PLEASE. Especially after it had emptied out, and the cubicles were vacant spaces spattered with the sad banal detritus of the modern veal-pen. The power strip. The ethernet cable that would never carry another bit. In boxes and out boxes. A cork board with no notes, only pins (someone had removed the last bits of paper, but put the pins back; where else would they go?)
So: “Temporarily” is a reassurance. This door isn’t going anywhere, folks. Last week one of the doors developed a hideous squeak, an awful metal peal of pain. The Temporary Closing may be related. I saw one of the building’s numberless Moties working on the door. (Don’t mean to demean building maintenance – we see a few specific fellows in the newsroom configuring this and that, but even after al these years I run into someone I’ve never seen before, bent over a task that seems his specific duty.) I thanked him for doing something about the ghastly screech, and he explained: the ground beneath the building had changed.
What, the internet screwed with our literal foundation, too?
The door wasn’t the problem. It was a slab of marble beneath the door. After half a century it had . . . moved, slightly, enough to cause contention with the door itself. He had a circular grinder. He put on a mask and bent to his task, and the dust of some ancient quarry filled the vestibule. Wonder if someone inhaled it, and will carry a molecule of an Italian quarry for fifty years and leave it in the ground on the other side of the world. Every day has a mystery like this; we’d probably go mad if we knew them all.
Speaking of mysteries: enjoy a little Black-and-White World right now. Can you name the actor? It’s unnerving, in a way. Enjoy! See you around
Pass it along, if you wish
49 Responses to Wednesday, Feb. 24
Host with the Most
That elevator indicator is fan-freaking-tastic! I’m going to try modeling it in in 3D.
“A knob! Curses!” Yeah. (The guy is probably one of the miscreants in the Brink’s commercials.) And don’t get me started on hiding under the covers. Absolutely monster-proof.
He started out as a harmonica player. The guy in 100 Mysteries today.
Bob
Doors like that can be monstrously expensive to fix.
How sad to see the building die off a section at a time, like cutting away dead limbs from an old favorite tree.
The 100 Mysteries guy. The forehead, the mustache, the voice are so distinctive. I have a hard time imagining him in a comedic role, though. He was in a film noir with Jane Wyatt that was pretty depressing.
Wow, seems like he was around forever, doesn’t it? On the other hand, he got a latish start in the movies – he was 27 when he played Tony. On the gripping hand, he was only 65 when he died. He was one of those guys who looked old long before he got there.
You had the kind of wind that the British call a lazy wind, because it can’t be bothered to go around you?
Oh yeah, Lee. J. Cobb, the man who was everywhere on TV and the big screen. I was watching a movie a while ago with Humphrey Bogart playing a missionary priest in the far east facing up to the war lord, a former partner in crime, Mieh Yang. Wait, he looks so familiar, in spite of the makeup, that voice, it’s LEE JAY COBB!
At first I thought it sounded like DiNiro. Ah well, Cobb waws never on my radar, so i wouldn’t have ever recognized him.
He moved on to the waterfront, ran the rackets for a while, then some stoolie got him sent up the river.
Thanks for the Motie reference. Especially these days, when I feel like a Meat.
Lee J. Cobb was one of those multi-purpose “ethnic” actors. Not only Italian, but Chinese (as noted above), Siamese (in the 1946 non-musical version of The King and I – with REX HARRISON as the King), Arab, etc. Pretty much everything but Jewish, which he actually was.
Didn’t realize how much work he did in Europe in the 70s, when just about any american actor lended some weight to the project. And a lot of them are damn good action movies.
I have noticed the same thing about Mr. Cobb. How does he look older in 1938 than he does in 1954? Or 1957? Freaky.
Regarding kids, I know I can count on two things if my son is upstairs after I’ve been tidying: his closet door will be open and the shower curtain will be open. I’ve never asked him, but I’m certain it’s because of what “might” be behind them if they are closed.
B&W World: Biff and Happy’s Dad!
Leaving the Child’s door open or closed is for naught when your 75 pound Labrador pushes open doors at his convenience in the early evening hours. If said Labrador is blacker than night, he becomes the source of robber and boogieman histrionics.
Two entrances in our satff downsized facilities. One is a street entrance, with a foyer where the elevator from the parking garage delivers it’s load. The other, the entrance from the public parking area. With 3/4 of the staff no longer in the building, only the Public Parking entrance remains in use. A sad sight indeed, to enter from the Parking Garage and see the swirling sea of empty cubicles. Took a year before we finally went through all the old desks and collected the office supplies. We’re set for supplies for at least another year. I’ve already sent 70 monitors and desktops off to the recyclers. Waiting in the wings, old Linux servers from 13 remote locations.
February is a slog, regardless of location, even here in the Nor Cal foothills. We had a glorious week of near 70 degree days, following a solid two weeks of rain and cold temps. Pear trees, plum trees were all fooled. Started their picturesque spring performance as they frequently do in February. Then, this week, back to rain, wind and 40 degrees. Consequently, white, pink, and lavender blooms litter the wet ground. As the old Imperial Margarine commercials used to say, it may not be nice to fool Mother Nature, but well, she’s kind of asking for at this point. No?
I recall that when I was a kid, I was certain monsters couldn’t get me as long as I had the blankets pulled up under my chin. Any neck or shoulders uncovered, I was in peril.
It’s not supposed to make sense.
The first photo of Lee J. Cobb on Black and White is a dead ringer for DiNiro.
I think the closest he came to playing Jewish was in MEN OF BOY’S TOWN where he takes over the role of Dave Morriss, played in BOY’S TOWN by Henry Hull.
Bob
“Crepuscular”
Fantastic. Another word for the vocabulary! Thanks, James! I plan to use it when referring to my cats this evening.
I thought Lee J. Cobb was DeNiro, too. An amazing likeness. If someone wanted to make a movie of Cobb’s life, the casting agent would have the lead actor immediately.
I don’t suppose there’s any relation? Nah.
I’m another voice in the choir who thought Lee J. Cobb was Robert DeNiro for a second. He even has the mole on the cheek. But as soon as I saw the link I was embarrassed for not recognizing Cobb. But then I always confuse LJC with Keenan Wynn for some reason (or is it Keenen Ivory Wayans?).
About the sign on the door: I used to work in a building where someone had posted a sign that said “DOOR MUST REMAIN CLOSED EXCEPT WHEN IN ACTUAL USE.” Some wiseacre had come along at one time or another and crossed out “ACTUAL,” only to replace it with “SIMULATED.”
In “Golden Boy” Cobb plays William Holden’s father although they are only a few years apart in age. Holden’s love interest, Barbara Stanwyck, is actually older than both of them.
Holden is almost unrecognizable in the 1939 film. He actually got better looking as he aged.
(snif) they don’t let you pull up the covers at work to ward off the monsters. waaAAAAAHHHH!
my business requires multiple (like 70+) central offices around the metro. there are a screaming tubload of remote systems that feed into them, for all your communications needs.
the definition of “communications needs” has been changing since 1984, and drastically since 1998. you wouldn’t believe the changes in the past several years.
our building only has one echo chamber whence once there was activity, and that’s Mahogany Row, closed off a year plus ago by Real Estate. ooh, there’s a boogeyman, Real Estate. they come by and take your coffeepots!
but in the COs, man, there are 8-foot racks in whole sections of the building vacant, but occasionally dusted to keep the filters of the live stuff clean. lights off. to the ceiling, grey-brown racks with empty tube sockets in some places, thousands of empty card slides in others.
and then you walk by another section, where there is a new access badge reader. all new equipment, shining, warm, “caution – laser” signs all about, and the fibers march step by step, row by row, down the yellow chases to new and wonderful things.
the fibers are taking over the old teletype system and frequency-division racks.
the buckets are changing, plastic instead of metal, but we keep getting new buckets as the old ones are carted off, or depowered in place.
new buckets are a wonderful thing.
I didn’t have to listen to the clip, Cobb’s name popped into my head immediately. Something about the chin I think. I have long been a fan, 12 Angry Men (one of my top 5 favorite movies), the Flint movies, some bad 70′s TV. A great American character actor.
Hey, I never thought about it before, as Barbara Stanwyck was ranching on “The Big Valley”, old Leo Jacoby was ranching on “The Virginian.” Too bad Holden did not do TV, there could have been a showdown/reunion.
Glad you mention Flint films. Lileks a few Bleats back confused Derek Flint’s “boss”* with Matt Helm’s.
*no one is flint’s boss
D Palmer: “I didn’t have to listen to the clip, Cobb’s name popped into my head immediately. Something about the chin I think. I have long been a fan, 12 Angry Men (one of my top 5 favorite movies), the Flint movies, some bad 70’s TV. A great American character actor.”
That was my reaction exactly. I am also with Jennifridge in placing him with Keenan Wynn. I am always surprised to see Cobb in the “light” Flynt movies.
Cobb appears, believe it or not, in two Hopalong Cassidy pictures about this time; in one he plays a bald banker, in another he plays a villainous rancher; he looks about 45 years old in both. He plays a Jewish character in THE EXORCIST, Lieutenant Kinderman.
Juanito-John Davey:
Have you ever tried to sell or give away old computer (CRT) monitors lately? Any takers?? I have over a dozen at a remote facility that are just sitting in a storage room. They all work to varying resolutions, and it seems a waste to just chuck them (ahem, dispose of them in an evironmentally responsible fashion). Most folks want the big screen LCD’s on their desk, and they’re relatively cheap now ($150).
It won’t be too much longer when we’ll see old movies panning an office cubicle farm where everyone has CRT monitors – then we’ll get the kids quizzical “Whazzat?!” prompts. The CRT’s are bulky and heavy, but I like their bright and warm display. I keep one in the attic in case one of my LCD’s goes bad. She-who-must-be-pleased wants the LCD monitor, so she gets the LCD.
@Jennifer:
“How does he look older in 1938 than he does in 1954? Or 1957? Freaky.”
Consider this: When he played washed-up salesman Willy Loman, a man with two grown sons and success long behind him, he was only 38 years old.
Lee J. Cobb is one of those guys who was born looking like he was in his 50s.
Another one is James Gandolfini.
Had Spiderman been made into a movie in the 1960′s Lee J Cobb would’ve made an excellent J. Jonah Jameson.
Sam Jaffe always seemed the same age from the 30s to the 70s.
NO takers on the CRTs – half were 15 inch, the rest 17 – 19 inch in various states of service. Called Schools, school districts, and churches. No one wanted them. In fact, in my youngest daughter’s kindergarten class they were fishing for donated flatscreens this year. I had enough CRTs to equip every classroom in the school with 5 each. In fact I have six old Pentium4 Small form factor desktops, each with 512 RAM that I am imaging for the Kindergarten classroom right now, and those are just from my house. The problem with the classrooms is space. Small form factors and LCD screens solve the space problem, but at this point the schools have no $$$ (CA schools get 51% of all sales tax, and it’s still not enough). Our school is the largest in the district with 700 kids, and they will be losing 6 teachers, and the assistant principal next year due to budget cuts. We’re going from 18 kids in a class last year to 30 or more next year. You’d think that beggars wouldn’t be choosers, but…
I recycle locally with YNot Recycle. They will come to your site and pick everything up – gratis. Even old broken copiers. They cleared out about 300 items for me in the fall of 09, and about 400 items back in early 2008 when we cleared out our old corporate building.
a reminder that it is I L L E G A L to dispose of old monitors by dumping them. behind a hill. like that hill. by this ravine. which seems to be half-full now. geez, get in, get in, lights!
most retailers periodically have free drop-off days in the spring, and best buy will recycle the old all the time. in Europe, it’s the law that if you sell (or ever sold) electroStuff, you have to take the ugly old crud in for recycling.
in the dark.
down a dirt road.
because these guys don’t have up signs so everybody knows they take the old stuff in.
In some parts of the country I believe winter dies easy and early; here it goes down like the Third Reich.
Here (Alaska) winter goes down like a call girl in rehab – reluctant, ornery, fighting to resist prior behaviors. Spring feels like winter tossing us a bone. The joke here is what do you do in Alaska in summer? Answer: If it falls on a weekend you barbecue!
Love this place nevertheless.
“Lee J. Cobb is one of those guys who was born looking like he was in his 50s.
Another one is James Gandolfini.”
Wilford Brimley always looked about 20 years older than he actually was.
Was Roddy McDowall the opposite of a Lee J. Cobb?
@juanito-John Davey
California class size of 18!!! I don’t mean to be a ackjass (yeah right fizz) but at that ratio all the kids should be genie-uses, or at least know how to spell. Why, in MY day, the typical class size was around 36. It dwindled some after the T-Rex found the cave.
The only thing that ever creeps around my house at night is the dachshund looking for the doggie door. I think that makes her “crapuscular,” right?
Fizzbin, you just reminded me of the schoolhouse I went from 1st through 6th grade. It was a village of 200 people with some kids from the surrounding township farms bussed in. Mrs. Voss had grades 1-3 and Mrs. Eakin had grades 4-6. I’m guessing there were about 15 kids per classroom. Imagine keeping order and a coherent lesson plan spanning 3 grades and kids with varying abilities to “get it.” It wasn’t easy, and I must confess to having driven Mrs. Eakin to use the board of education on me a few times to focus my attention.
California passed a law (or was it a ballot initiative – can’t recall….) regarding class size when the state was flush many years back. Our rural school has been at the 18 – 22 class size for the past four years. The rooms can only hold about that many before it becomes unworkable. Kindergarten class this year has four tables of six kids. Should be up near 40 next year.
I grew up in the 70s in California Public schools before I attended Catholic High School in the 80s. Classes were always around 22 – 25 students. In fact my parents pulled us out of our neighborhood public school in the late 70s because the class sizes had grown so much that the school had basically become subsidized daycare. The City Schools in Sacramento had started a “Basic School” pilot program (Reading, Writing, Math, and tons O’ Homework). Sort of a Carter School Pre-cursor. So my parents enrolled us in that school. All the way across town, but worth it.
I guess I should start attending Mass more regularly since I’ve heard that the six year old Catholic elementary school at our local church is doing very well…
Man! All this talk about school and class sizes has broken some of the plaque off of my neurons. I grew up in th ’50s (B.C.) and was educated by Dominican nuns. Those ladies were hard core cadre. My 5th or 6th grade teacher would often rant about the Soviets, saying we should A-bomb them all, but then quickly saying that wasn’t God’s way while she fingered the beads of her monster rosary. My 4th grade teacher, Sister Giovanni, used to make me sit in the tall waste basket next to her desk because of my smart-mouth. I’ve mellowed some since then
I’m going to dig up my HS yearbooks and see if I’m right about class sizes.
Walther Matthau also always looked about 30 years older than his actual age. How he ever became a star, I’ll never know.
Ah, to name someone a Motie is not an insult, especially a technical person. We “Motie” things here at XCOR. It’s a verb. And Larry and Jerry are aware of this: we have a photo of Niven in the cockpit of the EZ-Rocket, running one of the engines. He has a very large grin on his face.
Well fizzbin, it sounds like we were (maybe still are) birds of a feather from the 50′s. I didn’t grow up Catholic although I did convert as an adult, so I only have accounts of those I went to high school with about the nuns. My sisters had the good fortune of going to the local convent school in Beaverville where Al Capone was reputed to have sent his daughters in the 20′s. Apparently the nuns there were a pretty tame lot. No tales of misery and woe from my sisters. The nuns in St. Anne’s about 8 miles away, well, lets just say they could give Torquemada a good run for his money, according to some of my high school acquaintances.
All this time, I didn’t know I was a Motie, except I guess I am some bas-tard crossbreed between Engineer and Watchmaker, since I am both. They got just about all the characteristics right, except that I am about a third *larger* than other Moties.
I am going to have to go to the library and see if they have that book!
First thing I thought when I saw the guy in the Black-and-White World picture was, “Hey, that’s Marshall Lou Ramsay, dressed like a janitor.” Interesting how one particular role an actor does sticks with you, despite their very best efforts in other performances. Lou Ramsay was the Arizona lawman in How the West Was Won who helped George Peppard fight a running gun battle with the bad guys on a train that, the first few times I saw it in a genuine three-projector Cinerama theater, literally came off the screen aimed at my 11-year old head. Maybe that’s why I remember that role first in Lee J. Cobb’s career. His voice in the clip only confirmed it was indeed Lou, as we who saw HTWWW eleventy thousand times the summer it was released felt privileged to call him. Yes, there is a certain DeNiro element about him in the B&WW picture. Never noticed that before. Very interesting.
As far as playing Jewish characters goes, I remember his terrific (although brief screen time) performance as Judge Bernstein, in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The judge literally saves the main character (Gregory Peck) from a fate almost but not hardly worse than death if you ask me. Even more prominently, in Exodus, Cobb played Barak Ben Canaan, head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the father of Paul Newman’s character, Ari Ben Canaan. I can’t imagine getting a much more Jewish role to play than that. Moses maybe, but Mr. C. Heston of Los Angeles had sewn that up four years previously. Don’t know if he could sing, but I think Cobb would have been a great Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. There must be some reason he never played Tevye. Or did he?
Still, that train derailing in the Arizona desert and a flatcar dumping a steam tractor in my Cinerama-enhanced lap is fixed forever and all time in my brain. Lee J. Cobb is Lou Ramsey, Frontier Marshal. There’s a poster cutline if I ever heard one. Good old Lee, shooting bad guys in perpetuity with his Winchester, much like the mote of Italian marble dust now in someone’s lung that is enroute to planet Nivenpournelle in the Rigel VII system.
And it was a night light that kept the boogeyman at bay at our house. My grandad’s solution for my vexed parents as I recall. As long as it burned, nothing could get to us (kids). Not even the bad guys from the train that Lou hadn’t shot yet.
In that Italian janitor still, Lee J. Cobb looks like the bastard offspring of Kevin James and Robert DeNiro.
“Was Roddy McDowall the opposite of a Lee J. Cobb?”
Yeah, him and Dick Clark, up until a coupla years ago.
[...] little weekend Lileks Yeah, I know what you mean: Cold day. Damned cold, with a mean wind full of hatpins – pure raw winter eternal, laughing at [...]