Yesterday was pretty much nothing but proofreading in order to make up for the previous day being pretty much nothing but being behind on work. Today it is snowing again. It is one of my fervent hopes that the infrastructure disaster that is currently the MBTA (closing again over the weekend, I have just learned) will put paid to any notions of Boston being ready for the Olympics.
1. Courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel: the Doves were not all drowned. After a painstaking restoration of the hundred-year-old typeface as a digital font, the designer has recovered a hundred and fifty pieces of the original, spitefully discarded lead type from the Thames. I find that this makes me extraordinarily happy.
2. Courtesy ofsairaali: Alan Turing's codebreaking notes found weatherstripping a Bletchley hut. And when I say "notes," I mean "top-secret ephemera." Banbury sheets. Workings-out. Scrap papers that should have been destroyed as soon as their writers were done with them, but the huts were jerry-built and drafty and someone needs to stuff something in the cracks before we all come down with pneumonia. How much do I love that some of the notes are indecipherable? "Nobody seems to be able to work out what they are—we've sent things off to GCHQ—and there are a number of items that we've yet to understand properly. We're unveiling a mystery."
3. Apparently it is Darwin Day. So here is my favorite picture of Charles Darwin: a daguerreotype taken in 1842 with his oldest child William. I saw it for the first time in 2006, when all the images I'd ever seen of Darwin were white-bearded and patriarchal, the elder statesman of evolution. I looked at this one and thought of no one so much as Bob Cratchit, with one of the innumerable little Cratchits on his lap. (Larger, black-and-white here.)
4. Mystery Street (1950) is a delightful, solid little film noir with the distinction of being the first Hollywood production filmed in Boston. If you enjoy time capsules, it is a godsend of location shooting, from a perfectly recognizable Harvard Yard and Beacon Hill to the bars of Scollay Square and a showdown in the railyards of Trinity Station. Boston accents are negligible to hilarious, but the degree and technical detail of forensic science onscreen is unmatched by anything I've seen from its decade. There is also the pleasure of Ricardo Montalbán starring as a Latino detective in a plot that acknowledges racism without characterizing its protagonist by his race: it's not about whether a detective named Moralas can crack a murder case in Boston, which in 1950 almost guarantees a well-meaning, clunky message picture; it's about whether Lieutenant Peter Moralas from Barnstable County can crack a six-month cold case with nothing but a skeleton dug out of Hyannis sand to go on, relative inexperience and institutional prejudice not helping any. He's a terrific noir lead, a bright, capable, ambitious outsider who is neither tragically flawed nor infallible; he comes very close to railroading an innocent man because the circumstantial evidence is so tidy and the pressure for an arrest is so high (and the stakes for a marginalized detective with his first murder case are even higher: "Up in the Portuguese district where I'm assigned, it's mostly small stuff"), but the little discrepancies pull him back at the last minute, some scientific, some emotional, because he is in fact very good at his job. He has to be. This is a film that recognizes microaggressions, even if it doesn't have the word for them—a wealthy, WASPy suspect openly sneers at Moralas, reminding the blue-collar, lightly accented detective that "there was a Harkley around these parts long before there was a U.S.A.," but even his coworkers joke, when they see him playing handball in a concrete court by himself, "Still knocking down walls, huh?" Many a noir protagonist is a loner by temperament; Moralas is a loner because everyone else assigned to the "Skeleton Girl" case is a white Boston cop. The film is also strikingly attentive to the position of women in the story, from the blackmailing B-girl murder victim to her waitress housemate who knows how to handle a .45 to the wife of a jailed man packing up their small apartment because she can't pay the rent with her husband awaiting trial instead of working a steady job. We watched it for the city and were delighted by the results. Elsa Lanchester steals a bunch of scenes as the murdered girl's amoral landlady; she would have made a hell of a Mrs. Lovett. I couldn't help thinking that Touch of Evil (1958) would have been so much better with Montalbán instead of Charlton Heston. And it's not like that film's not a classic or anything.
5. The elephant selkie Valentine.
1. Courtesy of
derspatchel: the Doves were not all drowned. After a painstaking restoration of the hundred-year-old typeface as a digital font, the designer has recovered a hundred and fifty pieces of the original, spitefully discarded lead type from the Thames. I find that this makes me extraordinarily happy.2. Courtesy of
sairaali: Alan Turing's codebreaking notes found weatherstripping a Bletchley hut. And when I say "notes," I mean "top-secret ephemera." Banbury sheets. Workings-out. Scrap papers that should have been destroyed as soon as their writers were done with them, but the huts were jerry-built and drafty and someone needs to stuff something in the cracks before we all come down with pneumonia. How much do I love that some of the notes are indecipherable? "Nobody seems to be able to work out what they are—we've sent things off to GCHQ—and there are a number of items that we've yet to understand properly. We're unveiling a mystery."3. Apparently it is Darwin Day. So here is my favorite picture of Charles Darwin: a daguerreotype taken in 1842 with his oldest child William. I saw it for the first time in 2006, when all the images I'd ever seen of Darwin were white-bearded and patriarchal, the elder statesman of evolution. I looked at this one and thought of no one so much as Bob Cratchit, with one of the innumerable little Cratchits on his lap. (Larger, black-and-white here.)
4. Mystery Street (1950) is a delightful, solid little film noir with the distinction of being the first Hollywood production filmed in Boston. If you enjoy time capsules, it is a godsend of location shooting, from a perfectly recognizable Harvard Yard and Beacon Hill to the bars of Scollay Square and a showdown in the railyards of Trinity Station. Boston accents are negligible to hilarious, but the degree and technical detail of forensic science onscreen is unmatched by anything I've seen from its decade. There is also the pleasure of Ricardo Montalbán starring as a Latino detective in a plot that acknowledges racism without characterizing its protagonist by his race: it's not about whether a detective named Moralas can crack a murder case in Boston, which in 1950 almost guarantees a well-meaning, clunky message picture; it's about whether Lieutenant Peter Moralas from Barnstable County can crack a six-month cold case with nothing but a skeleton dug out of Hyannis sand to go on, relative inexperience and institutional prejudice not helping any. He's a terrific noir lead, a bright, capable, ambitious outsider who is neither tragically flawed nor infallible; he comes very close to railroading an innocent man because the circumstantial evidence is so tidy and the pressure for an arrest is so high (and the stakes for a marginalized detective with his first murder case are even higher: "Up in the Portuguese district where I'm assigned, it's mostly small stuff"), but the little discrepancies pull him back at the last minute, some scientific, some emotional, because he is in fact very good at his job. He has to be. This is a film that recognizes microaggressions, even if it doesn't have the word for them—a wealthy, WASPy suspect openly sneers at Moralas, reminding the blue-collar, lightly accented detective that "there was a Harkley around these parts long before there was a U.S.A.," but even his coworkers joke, when they see him playing handball in a concrete court by himself, "Still knocking down walls, huh?" Many a noir protagonist is a loner by temperament; Moralas is a loner because everyone else assigned to the "Skeleton Girl" case is a white Boston cop. The film is also strikingly attentive to the position of women in the story, from the blackmailing B-girl murder victim to her waitress housemate who knows how to handle a .45 to the wife of a jailed man packing up their small apartment because she can't pay the rent with her husband awaiting trial instead of working a steady job. We watched it for the city and were delighted by the results. Elsa Lanchester steals a bunch of scenes as the murdered girl's amoral landlady; she would have made a hell of a Mrs. Lovett. I couldn't help thinking that Touch of Evil (1958) would have been so much better with Montalbán instead of Charlton Heston. And it's not like that film's not a classic or anything.
5. The elephant selkie Valentine.
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