Ipswich Public Library
Ipswich, Massachusetts

I first saw this on American TV when I was around 12 years old, and it really made me think about accuracy, authenticity and the media. Although I knew spaghetti doesn’t grow on trees and was watching this on a program that presented it as a hilarious hoax, I was surprised at how plausible the story seemed when you listen to that authoritative BBC voice, accompanied by scenes of spaghetti fluttering gently from the trees, and workers carefully picking it and draping it over their arms.

“charles olson and vincent ferrini fire their poetry pistols in a duel at niles beach”

Erik Lomen’s mural depicts musician Willie Alexander’s dream of Gloucester poets Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini “shooting poems and words like bullets at one another on a beach.”

The mural also includes an outline of Gloucester Harbor between the poets, and a diagram of a letterpress machine that Vincent Ferrini donated to Montserrat College of Art.

The mural is located on 301 Cabot Street, Beverly, Massachusetts, by the delivery entrance on Charnock Street, facing the parking lot of the Beverly Animal Hospital.

See Olson Ferrini Mural on the artist’s website

My mother always hoped that someday we’d go on a family road trip and drive all the way across the country to California, but we never did. Sometimes I dream of that trip, though, and imagine us pulling off the highway and checking into someplace with little cottages like this. Hollywood! How exciting that would have been.

The theme here is fate, and the treatment is anything but subtle. Piano player Al (Tom Neal) is stuck at a low-end New York nightclub, a job only made bearable by his girlfriend and co-worker Sue. When she goes off to Los Angeles to seek a better life, he mopes around until he finally decides to hitchhike across the country to be with her. He makes it to Arizona and gets a ride from unsavory bookie Charles Haskell Jr. (Edmund MacDonald.) It’s all downhill from there — accidents, coincidences and bad decision-making, and Al’s life spirals downward. If only he hadn’t been picked up by Charles Haskell, Jr. If only he hadn’t picked up Vera (Ann Savage.) But these things couldn’t be avoided, because Al is in the grip of inexorable fate!

This movie has fallen in the public domain, and I watched it on the Internet Archive site. To me, it’s a perfect 1940′s Noir film, dark and brooding, unrelieved by any (intentional) humor, and filled with biting, hard-boiled slang. It also happens to feature several of my favorite things: diners, motels, lonely highways through the desert, hitchhiking, service stations. A quick look at the movie’s thumbnails (one frame per minute of the film) provides a pretty good preview.

This cardboard record was included in a magazine promotion. Lyrics include “Oh that Roll-a-matic, adjusts to any kind of beard and skin, makes you wish you had a double chin” and “Ain’t misbehavin’, I’m shavin’ myself for you.”

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

Happy 253rd birthday, Robert Burns! My Scottish grandmother Agnes Greig (Ross) Rennie used to tell me his poems “To a Mouse” and “To a Louse” as stories. She always had a framed picture of him prominently displayed, and her frequent fond references to Rabbie Burns gave me the vague notion that he was a relative or old family friend she knew as a child back in the Old Country.

If I had any Drambuie in the house, I’d raise a proper Agnes Rennie toast to him tonight! But I don’t, so I’m settling for a cup of tea in one of my grandmother’s Scottish teacups, and listening to my favorite poems from the Librivox’s wonderful Robert Burns 250th Anniversary Collection.

It finally looks like winter here! It was a steady, gentle snowfall, more decorative than disruptive. A good day to be outside taking pictures!

We still haven’t had any snow worth mentioning — I haven’t had to break out the shovel yet. But it’s definitely winter!

It’s not really winter — the weather is mild, and we haven’t had any real snow here yet other than one surprise snowstorm in October when the leaves were still on the trees. (But even that was only an inch or so where I live.)

I don’t really like having to deal with the snow. I hate dressing for it, I hate shoveling it and I hate driving through it, but I do like taking photographs of it. The weather we’ve had so far this winter has just left us with something that’s not even winter. It’s no season at all: no light, no color, no flowers, no plants, no snow. Nothing.

Newbury, Massachusetts