I’ve been going through many old photos to assemble a funeral slideshow. It’s the subject of this week’s free Substack, which is more serious and discursive because I’m not in the mood for anything amusing. The Substack is about the different mediums that document the Boomer-era life. What I have to say here is advice for everyone going forward:
1. Take more pictures. However many you think you take, take more.
2. Smile. Some people are amused and a bit annoyed when younger people stuck a camera in their mugs, because those whipper and/or snappers have to shoot everything, but trust me: smile. Even if you don’t like your smile. Women, stop putting your hand up in front of the lens or turning away.
3. For the love of Gregg Toland please shoot some videos in landscape orientation. I know that ship sailed long ago, and we have a portrait video of it sailing so we don’t ever see the whole ship, just slices and jerky pans back and forth, but when everything is in portrait it’s like looking at life through a keyhole.
That was my weekend, aside from the usual delicious meals and the boon of ice cream. Lots of photo retouching. I suppose there's an AI site now that would fix everything and straighten everything and remove the noise and floss everyone's teeth and sort the money in their pocket by denomination, but I'd rather do it by hand. Which is funny: "I'd rather do the computer-assisted work by hand instead of letting a better computer-assisted program do it."
So, anything else? Is it time for that I Love Lucy comic? I suppose.
Confession: as a kid I didn't really like the show. Everyone was always yelling or crying. Fred and Ethel seemed like a couple of sacks of old surly woe.
I have more. I will show you more.
Now, some news about which no one cares BUT it's a fascinating look into my world! Okay, it's a look. We're all about the daily and the quotidian here as well as the retro and the abiding, right?
They have made a grievous design decision at the 333. To bring you up to speed, and I'm sure you're all just riveted by this topic: the 333 is the building through which I pass to get to work when the weather is too cold, or sometimes just too hot. It is one of my favorite buildings, classically massed in the post-modern style. An absolute high-80s tower, forever mourning its unborn twin. On its site was a motel where I stayed once, with an Embers restaurant.
Then:
Now:
I’m always in a better mood when I pass through it, because I’m going to the office where I’m going to have a cup of hot coffee. I’m in a better mood when I go the other way, because I have a minute of music to identify in the skyway, then perhaps a hail-fellow two-finger hello to Ishmael, the building security guy. He gives me the Nixon gesture and I give him a crisp salute from a non-existent hat brim. Occasionally I stop at the desk and we talk. We bonded in 2020 when the world emptied out and it seemed as if it was just us.
For some reason the building’s owners decided it needed a refresh, even though nothing was dated. The building’s lobby is timeless. They got tidied up of a very 80s fountain and put in a Living Wall, a decision which which I disagreed. But I got used to it. Now they’re renovating the vacated coffee shop to install a . . . a coffee shop. Skyway lobby seating will be added. Light fixtures have been changed. I gather they want the skyway lobby to be a destination where people will mingle and have spontaneous collaboration.
A day later, the full horror:
To this end they have blocked off the glass that allowed you a view of the lobby, and serves was a dull terminus. So I had to go to Ishmael and say you know I am a fair man. I do not complain for the sake of it. I accept the new light fixtures. But this. . . this is not a wise decision.
There was another guy behind the security desk. “Architects!” He said. “You can’t say no to what they want.”
“Yes! Yes you can! You’re paying the bills!”
I wonder if they think of Architects as some secular priestly caste, sweeping with with their key grey hair and thick robes, arching an eyebrow at some terribly jejune chair that goes against the entire aesthetic of the room.
“It should not be white! Why is it white? The room, the room speaks of an enveloping darkness, a sense of the void that awaits us all! And in this space of constructed negativity, this manifestation of an absence, you put a white chair?”
“Well it is a bathroom and most toilets are going to be white, so -“
“Find me a black one! Carve it out of obsidian if you must! Send me proof when you are finished. I must return to my Arizona compound and consider whether I wish to continue. You will hear from my seconds.”
The trademarks of a 100 years ago is our theme this year.
Frank W. Foye dba as FrankW. Foye. Easy to remember.
They're not claiming a trademark to "Flour," which seems reasonable. You wonder if anyone tried that.
Swank:
Never ask someone who's having a stroke how to spell Daniel Amphitheater:
Ah, the wordless chorus.
I think this is going to be a women’s pic.
Bob Cummings has traveled to . . .
. . . Venice, to meet a 105-year-old lady who had an affair with Jeremy Ashton, a famous poet many years ago. MANY years ago. Bob wants to get the poet's love letters. One expects that a flashback will consume the majority of the movie, but where does Bob Cummins come in then? Will he play the poet in a prevous life? It is awfully gothic, after all.
She’s so old she’s regarded as an object of horror.
It’s Agnes Moorhead, believe it or not.
There are cats and frightened maids and Tina, an icy aloof women who is the great-great-niece of the old lady, who might also be possessed by the spirit of the old lady, even though she’s not dead, so we have all the current late 40s spiritualism stuff. See, at night, Tina becomes . . . A ROMANTIC PIANIST.
That's how pianists look when they are in the throes of ART:
But she seems to be in a strange trance! Maybe she actually is the spiritual embodiment of the beautiful woman who inspired the poet? Even though the lady’s STILL DOWNSTAIRS probably snoring?
Bob Cummins consults with the local priest, who says yeah, well, about that. Miss Tina’s nuts. We all know it. She think she’s the old lady when she puts on a special ring, at which point she thinks the old lady is the housekeeper she used to hate.
Fine WHATEVER, where are the letters? He thinks. He wants to publish them. See, he’s an unscrupulous publisher, an old archetype.
Slow and strange in a way only 40s movies could be.
Go ahead, it's a holiday, give yourself some old-movie education.
Or just scrub through to find the inevitable straaaaange and tragic conclusion.
Since it's Monday:
That will do. Another week begins here at the Bleat with your usual Matchbook update, and a free column at the Substack. Thank you for your patronage.
