Mental acuity

My transcription from Aaron Rupar’s clip:

“On the renovation of — as an example, I’m doing a magnificent big beautiful ballroom that the country has wanted, that the White House has wanted, for a hundred and fifty years. It’s a massive job and it’s a tiny fraction of that number. And we’re under budget and ahead of schedule. Now it’s, it’s bigger than I told you. I, it’s, you know — after realizing we’re gonna do the inauguration in that building. It’s got all bulletproof glass, it’s got all drone, they call it drone-free roof. It’s so drones won’t touch it. It’s a big, eh, it’s a big, beautiful, safe building. But it’s, you know, it’s a big project, for a tiny fraction of that. We’re under budget and ahead of schedule. And they wanted it for a hundred and fifty years. Think of it. The Federal Reserve Building, two buildings here, they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard)

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Hulu, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

Oy to the World (dir. Paula Elle, 2025). When a water pipe in a synagogue bursts, old school rivals — a rabbi’s son, now in a rock band, and an Episcopal priest’s daughter, now her church’s choral director — join to lead an ecumenical children’s choir, and love blooms. One problem with this movie: there’s no chemistry between the leads. Another: the movie presents Episcopalians as the unmarked case (no talk of, say, their post-service coffee hour, known as “the eighth sacrament”) while playing to ridiculous lengths on tropes of Jewish food and culture. Think of the Frasier episode “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Moskowitz,” in which the Cranes pretend to be Jewish, and Frasier laments, “By the time my brisket’s done my kugel will be dry as the Sinai.” ★ (H)

*

Just Another Girl on the IRT (dir. Leslie Harris, 1992). Chantel Mitchell (Ariyan A. Johnson) is young, gifted, and Black: she wants to finish high school in three years, head off to college, become a doctor, and not end up living, like her parents, in a Brooklyn housing project. Chantel addresses the camera with the same smarts and impatience with which she addresses her obstinate history teacher and school principal: you root for her at every turn. And then unforeseen circumstances upend her life. An indie movie that’s something like an Afterschool Special for young adults and grown-ups, and one of the best movies about adolescence I’ve seen. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Return to Glennascaul (dir. Hilton Edwards, 1951). Orson Welles made movies everyone knows, or should know, and he participated in all manner of projects that remain obscure, or obscure, at least, to me. The premise of this short: while filming Othello (which was not made in Ireland), Welles goes for a nighttime drive in the Irish countryside and gives a ride to a man whose car has broken down. One of the world’s many variations on the trope of the vanishing hitchhiker. A comic touch: Welles is recognized by other characters in the story: “Aren’t you …?” ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Princess Bride (dir. Rob Reiner, 1987). I realize now that Rob Reiner resembled Billy Wilder in directing such varied movies: This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally…, Misery, and so on: somehow I never got that. This movie is a sweet story of swashbucklers, a princess, and true love, set in a frame story with a grandfather (Peter Falk, looking like Kurt Vonnegut) reading to a skeptical grandson (Fred Savage). The cast includes André the Giant, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Carol Kane, and Wallace Shawn. My favorite bit: the cups of poison. ★★★★ (H)

*

Christmas in Connecticut (dir. Peter Godfrey, 1945). Barbara Stanwyck is Elizabeth Lane, unmarried and living in a New York City apartment, where she writes a magazine column about her purported life as a wife and mother on a Connecticut farm. When her publisher (Sydney Greenstreet) devises a publicity scheme to have a seaman who survived a U-boat attack (Dennis Morgan) visit the farm for Christmas, Elizabeth must come up with a farm, a husband, a baby, and flapjacks. Wonderfully funny and transgressive stuff: Elizabeth, who’s supposed to be married (to a friend, played by Reginald Gardiner, who lends his farm and seems at least a tad gay), falls instantly for her guest, and they soon end up in bed — a bed of snow — together. With S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall and Una O’Connor as great supporting players in the kitchen. ★★★★ (TCM)

[Fun to think once again about the mythic Connecticut where almost everyone gets around by sleigh. And strange to remember that this movie begins with two seamen adrift on a raft for eighteen days. And sad to think that this movie is likely the distant inspiration for the dreadful 2022 movie Christmas in Pine Valley .]

*

The Phenix City Story (dir. Phil Karlson, 1955). Drawn from the real-life story of Phenix City, Alabama, known for marked cards, crooked dice, slot machines, prostitution, and the murder of Albert Patterson, a local attorney who dared to run for attorney general. The story is told in semi-documentary style, with a lengthy preface in which a reporter interviews (white) townspeople. When the story kicks in, it’s with immense brutality and something of the flavor of On the Waterfront. John McIntire, Richard Kiley, and Kathryn Grant (later Kathryn Crosby) star, and look for Jean Carson (known for “Hello, doll” on The Andy Griffith Show ) in the Poppy Club. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Merry Christmas, Ted Cooper! (dir. Jason Borque, 2025). Okay, one more Christmas movie, as recommended by my daughter. It’s a genuinely funny story of Ted Cooper (Robert Buckley), a resolutely cheerful and optimistic TV weatherman (think Ted Lasso) who’s beset by mishaps every Christmas season (his co-workers even have a betting pool on what’ll happen to him). When he travels back to his hometown to cover a fundraiser for the local hospital, he runs into his high-school crush (Kimberly Sustad), now a doctor at — can you believe it? — that same hospital. Could Ted just maybe, maybe break his streak of Christmas mishaps? ★★★ (H)

*

Close to You (dir. Dominic Savage, 2023). Elliot Page is Sam, a trans man who travels from Toronto to his small home town for his father’s birthday after several years away. It’s not easy, and there are moments of great tension, mostly brought about by a sister’s boyfriend. There’s further emotional complexity in Sam’s highly charged encounters with high-school friend Katherine (Hillary Baack). The weakness in this movie: an overreliance on improv (I sensed it while watching and confirmed it afterwards), with scenes that end up sputtering out, but the story is nevertheless compelling in its depiction of what it might be like to show your true self to people who thought they knew you all along. ★★★★ (N)

*

The Door with Seven Locks‌ (dir. Norman Lee, 1940). It’s identified as horror, but in truth it’s a dull thriller. A dying nobleman, a treasure hidden behind a door with seven locks, an heiress (Lilli Palmer), an evil doctor (Leslie Banks), and seventy-nine long minutes. Some fireworks at the end with the the evil doctor, but they seem almost farcical after the dreariness that precedes them. I must add: in her 1950s secretarial days, my mom once saw Lilli Palmer and her then-husband Rex Harrison on a Manhattan street, by which point Lilli Palmer had likely long forgotten this movie. ★ (YT)

*

Stranger on the Prowl (dir. Joseph Losey, 1952). Wikipedia tells me that this movie is the first by a blacklisted American director working abroad. Deeply reminiscent of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), with a not-father and not-son fleeing the police in Livorno, Italy. Paul Muni is the homeless, penniless stranger; Vittorio Manunta, the boy, whose only crime is stealing a bottle of milk. This movie, which I’d never heard of, is, I’d say, one of the treasures of YouTube: watch it before it disappears. ★★★★

*

Meet John Doe (dir. Frank Capra, 1941). It’s a Wonderful Life wasn’t the first Capra movie to put suicide and Christmas together. It’s especially eerie to watch Meet John Doe in the time of AI and so-called influencers: “John Doe” is a media creation, a persona created not by AI but by AM — Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), a crafty newspaper columnist who dreams up a circulation stunt about a “common man” planning to take his own life as a protest against the state of civilization. Ann hires a man to play the role, a hobo named Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper); a populist movement (funded by the newspaper’s publisher) is born; and soon things turn very troubling. It’s always remarkable to see Capra swerve from Norman Rockwell territory into absolute darkness. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

A Christmas Carol (Edward L. Marin, 1938). I’m partial to Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol (dir. Abe Levitow, 1962), but this one works well. Atmospherics are perfect: the dim, narrow, snowy streets, Scrooge’s barren rooms; the Cratchits’ warm, joyful house. Reginald Owen makes a fine Scrooge – a curmudgeon whose bitterness is so profound as to be farcical. Gene and Kathleen Lockhart are the genial Bob and Mrs. Cratchit; daughter June appears as one of their children; and the actor who plays Tiny Tim, Terry Kilburn, is still with us, having turned ninety-nine last month: God bless us every one! ★★★★ (TCM)

[Here’s Terry Kilburn in a 2016 interview.]

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Yamandu Costa coming to the States

Seventeen concerts, April 11 to May 2, 2026. Details here.

I had the good fortune to hear Yamandu Costa in 2023, when his appearances in the United States were rare. If he’ll be playing near you, seek him out. He’s the most extraordinary guitarist I’ve ever heard.

A possible source for “asylums”

The common wisdom about the current occupant’s frequent references to countries emptying their prisons and asylums into the United States is that he doesn’t understand the difference between an asylum and a request for asylum. Maybe. But a passing reference in a The New York Times article (gift link) makes me wonder if that’s the case:

By the turn of the 20th century, anti-immigrant sentiment was rampant. The lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant wrote in his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, that foreign countries were taking advantage of America’s openness by unloading “the sweepings of their jails and asylums” and that the “whole tone of American life, social, moral and political has been lowered and vulgarized by them.”

I doubt the current occupant has the patience to make it to page 89 of that book. But I can guess who in the White House does, and who might be feeding talk of prisons and asylums to the current occupant: Stephen Miller.

(And who in 2025 speaks of “asylums” anyway?)

Irony of ironies: Madison Grant was writing about immigrants, in his words,

drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish Ghettos.

He was writing about people like Stephen Miller’s great-grandparents, Ashkenazi Jews who fled to the United States from Belarus in 1903. And Grant was writing about people like Dean Martin’s and Frank Sinatra’s ancestors. Miller recently praised a Martin/Sinatra Christmas special in these terms: “Imagine watching that and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.” The very people Miller celebrates are people whom Madison Grant would have preferred to keep out of the country.

The New Republic has a recent long piece about Stephen Miller’s worldview and aspirations: “Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State.” It includes a link to an unpublished family history written by Miller’s maternal grandmother, Ruth Glosser.

And here’s some commentary from Miller’s uncle, David S. Glosser.

[I don’t have the stomach to make it through more than a page of Madison Grant’s book. I searched its contents in Google Books and found the relevant passages on page 89.]

Woof

[362 Columbia Street, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

As Elaine asked: how much is that doggie in the window?

G. De Gennaro at no. 360 will [not] remain a mystery meat-purveyor. The 1940 Brooklyn telephone directory has a couple of close calls: Ciro De Gennaro, “meats,” at 6815 14th Avenue, and DeGennaro Bros, “fruits&veg” at 163 Kingston Avenue. I checked the 1940 census: whoever G. De Gennaro was, he (or she?) didn’t live at this address.

A correction: I didn’t realize that I was looking at the 1950 census. A more careful reader found Gaetano and Rose Degennaro at no. 360 in the 1940 census.

On the 1940 census page, seven of the nine residents of nos. 360 and 362 are identified as having been born in Italy (one in New York, one in Ohio). On the 1950 census page, three of the twenty residents of nos. 360 and 362 are identified as having been born in Italy, with nine born in New York and eight born in Puerto Rico, or “Pourto Rico,” as the census-taker spelled it.

It turns out that Columbia Street looms large in the story of Puerto Rican life in New York City.

The buildings still stand.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Rafael Musa. It’s his second, and it’s a good one. I’d call it just plain hard rather than tricky. I scanned the clues and found three (easy) starting points: 16-A, seven letters, “Canadian contemporary of Alice Munro”; 26-D, five letters, “Spread awkwardly”; and 50-A, four letters, “Source of American arabica.” And then I began to fill in the blanks.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, five letters, “Supporting cast member.” Okay, this one’s tricky.

15-A, fifteen letters, “Merger precursor.” Nice.

20-A, four letters, “Live the wrong way.” I knew it had to be.

24-D, five letters, “Fair housing.” See 20-A.

27-D, ten letters, “Wedding wheel-out.” Is this clue the giveaway I think it is?

33-D, five letters, “Word from Latin for ‘sandy place.’” I did not know that.

34-A, six letters, “What might say GRANDMA WAS HERE.” My first thought: COOKIES?

51-A, four letters, “Hands or feet.” Hmm — I think this answer should be clued with singular nouns.

53-D, four letters, “Author inspired by Zora.” There’s an obvious answer, but it’s difficult to see right away how 54-A might mesh with it.

54-A, fifteen letters, “Evidence of a loving relationship.” I’m taking his word on this.

57-D, three letters, “Chambre d’______ (guest bedroom).” I guessed right.

60-A, eight letters, “Crescent shape.” Here’s what I mean by just plain hard.

61-A, six letters, “The first Eisenhower jackets.” I think I just learned about these jackets from the podcast Gear. But that didn’t give me the answer.

My favorite in this puzzle: 14-A, eight letters, “Yellow pages, historically.” Remember the Yellow Pages? Not them, or it.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

William Shawn, Mongol user

[From The New Yorker at 100 (dir. Marshall Curry, 2025). Click for a much larger view.]

William Shawn edited The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987.

How do I know they’re Mongols? The ferrules are the giveaway.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)

Coffee and immortality

Richard Brody, film critic for The New Yorker, in The New Yorker at 100 (dir. Marshall Curry, 2025):

“They say that people who drink three cups of coffee a day prolong their lives by a decade. I think I’m verging on immortality with the amount of coffee I drink. Without coffee, nothing gets done.”

Related reading
All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

A strange thing

Wonderfully strange to find John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme showing up as Stranger Things nears its end.

Christmas 1925

[“Santa to Find Way into Every Chimney: Thousands of Poor Children Will Be Made Merry at Scores of Parties.” The New York Times, December 24, 1925.]

In 2025, Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it.