Stop falling through that auction bridge...quit trying to walk into that full-house on your inside straight...don't leave your footprints in that sand-trap. Roll your bones in another alley! Save your quarter...only a fourth of a dollar...for a gamble where you're sure to win...adventure...romance...how detectives get their man-hunts...how the great got that way...Use your two-bits to rent a book from Womrath's...for a week...
It may be shameful to avoid
The apples of the unemployed
But, since they've been on every corner,
I have become an apple-scorner.
Snow, McIntosh, and Northern Spy
Are now as painful to my eye
As pencils and shoelaces were
When apples were uncommoner.
An antisocial state of things,
I know. It will not earn me wings.
But why, when wits were being deployed
To get the unemployed employed,
Did no one, to whom things were clear,
Distribute, say, light wines and beer?
I am now definitely ready to announce that Sex, as a theatrical property, is as tiresome as the Old Mortgage, and that I don't want to hear it mentioned ever again. I am sick of little Southern girls who want "to live." I am sick of hearting fathers and mothers talk to little girls, Southern or otherwise, about "what lies before them." I am sick of rebellious Youth and I am sick of Victorian parents, and I don't care if all the little girls in all sections of the United States get ruined or want to get ruined or keep from getting ruined. All I ask is: don't write plays about it and ask me to sit through them.
When going to bed, she dips a slim finger in the fat glass jar and rubs contents across the map of Manhattan in the mirror, paying particular attention to the bright lights that so easily run to dark circles on the morning after. Incipient crosstown lines are refused police protection. General traffic conditions are improved. And the Great White Way gets a gentle bleach all over.Now you know how to flatter a dame: "Darling, your face...it's like the street map of a huge metropolitan area. Your nostrils: the north and south subway lines. That freckle: city hall..."
In the morning, she uses the same specific as a foundation for make-up that looks more natural than little sister's first blush. Rouge--if she follows the revived vogue for it--can never be mistaken for a stop-signal. Powder doesn't skid. And the first aid work begun for the entire facial countryside goes on all day.
Of course, you have a bar in your pent-house, but even that does not insure social success!"Whew!" Said a bunch of advertising executives. "That's done! Now how can we make them frightened of RADIOS..."
Do you find that guests are glad to put their foot on the rail the first time, but seldom return? Do you feel like the girl who was often a bridesmaid but never a bride?
Of course, you have all your liquor analyzed, so you can't blame your bootlegger.
Perhaps the trouble is with you. Perhaps it's the way you mix the cocktails that bars you from the popularity you feel that you deserve.
Ankles aweigh! All abored the SS. VAN DINE...sailing to darkest Boop-a-Doop...land of mystery and philovances. Star-drenched daze. Sunkist knights. Drone of dramaturgic dromedaries...drowse of drastic dhuhinkies. Lots of good fellahs. Oil-burning cannibals...ready to take pot-luck with missionaries. Pooh yourself! More fun to stay home...The advertisement mentions fiction, travel, biography, and history, so I suppose the dense wordplay is meant to evoke all those things: the mystery books of Philo Vance, the "darkest Africa" travel literature, Hollywood biographies, and...whatever "dhuhinkies" are.
This is the time of wonder, it is written;You can find out more about Morris Bishop and his elf-loathing here.
Man has undone the ultimate mysteries.
(We turn from the Chrysler Tower to watch a kitten,
Turn to a dead fish from Isocrates;
Drinkers on five-day boats are gladly smitten
Unconscious on the subjugated seas;
Einstein is even more dull than Bulwer-Lytton;
You cannot smoke on the Los Angeles.)
Science no longer knows the verb-form "can't,"
Fresh meat will soon be shipped by radio;
Scholars are harnessing the urgent ant
And making monstrous bastard fruits to grow,
Building machines for things I do not want,
Discovering truths I do not care to know.
To conclude my memoirs on a lofty and dignified note, I should mention "Soil," a new Russian film. The picture is concerned with the favorite dramatic theme of the Soviet artists: the introduction of new methods of farming to the local wheatlands. Of more interest to these unusual people than the awakening of pure love or the dawn of passion is the coming of the tractor. I must say, too, that there are more persons in this town absorbed in this subject than one might suspect. Down there at that little Eighth Street house, where the picture has been shown, the crowd gets very excited, and there is applause, and even now and then a hiss... In "Soil," a silent picture, a caption was thrown on the screen, a comment of the older peasant as the tractor comes over the hilltop. "There is no God," he says at the sight, and this statement was suddenly met with applause by some of the guests. You will be happy to learn that at once the faithful downed the applause with pious hisses. The whole moment was very intense, and it was a great relief to everyone when the picture passed on to some closeups of apples seen from various angles.I can certainly understand and appreciate most propaganda, but "Earth" left me totally confused. I couldn't figure out if it was a love song to the soil, a warning to farmers, or an outright parody. Maybe it was all three?
Hitler threatens to cut off some important German heads unless the demands of his party are met. He evidently means to set up a dictatorship of decapitalists.Such is the style of New Yorker political commentary at the time: puns, puns, and more puns.
Of the hundreds of thousands who saw the remarkable first model which revolutionized toastmaking in America, not one would have believed it could ever have been improved upon.How has the Toastmaster improved in the last two years? They replaced one of the levers with a "small, new-type indicator," and it comes with "cool-type carrying handles" so you won't burn your pretty-type hands, and it also can't overheat and start your fur coat on fire at the flaming breakfast table! It won't burn your tabletop! It now does two slices at once! It's wonderful!
Yet--that has been done!
It is even more simple, more amazing, more beautiful!
From her grandmother's cellar...to Ziegfeld's Roof...in just the twinkle of a toe. She really was the "Sally"...of the alley called Broadway.The real interesting part of the advertisement, however, is the huge picture of Marilyn dancing in a dirty basement.
How to explain the miracle of Marilyn's success?...Nature simply blessed her with a charm all her own.
"Mar'lyn, chile, shake yo' feet!" Grandmother's kinky-haired old furnaceman was first to educate Marilyn Miller's feet. At those same feet, a few years later, old New York laid its heart.Ah, the kindly kinky-haired drudge with his native rhythm. There's also a reproduction of the moment when Old Gold's supposedly first arrived in Waikiki, but the quality is so poor I won't bother posting it. Which is a shame because it looks really bizarre.
In the mummy-case the queen--Who was Peggy Bacon? She wrote poetry (and later fiction) for The New Yorker from the first month of publication up to the 1950s, and she even drew a few illustrations along the way:
brittle toes and matted hair!
Her compelling portrait seen
on the lid, returns a stare.
Through millenniums enduring
as a relic, for a while
she was laughing and alluring
as a siren by the Nile.
Bead and bauble, tool and chattel,
symbol, amulet, and token,
effigies of sacred cattle
lie beside her, chipped or broken.
In the Bowery I meet
Sadie, similarly fair,
flashy sandals on her feet,
bangle, bead, and busy hair
(mummy-matted, tonsor twirled,
tinted with a dubious dye),
and a little serpent curled
in the angle of her eye.
There were four cameras. Three of them were the familiar movie cameras, a little bulky with their sound-insulation but recognizable. The fourth was the sound camera. Instead of a lens, it was fitted with a microphone at the end of a very long, very thin telescopic arm. The arm thrust out from the camera like the tentacle of an insect, and the microphone at its end was poised immediately over the spot where the action was to take place--high enough to be invisible to the lenses of the other cameras. As the actors moved about, the arm could be extended or shortened, raised or lowered in an instant so that the sound-collecting microphone always hovered over them.It's interesting that Markey doesn't know the names for any of this equipment, and so relates to it as though it were simply refurbished from the silent film days. The "boom microphone" is a "sound camera," even though it has nothing whatsoever in common with the other cameras. The cable which carries the sound is a "telephone wire."
The sound camera does not carry its own film. It merely carries certain electrical equipment which transmits the sound from the microphone to a telephone wire. The telephone wire carries the speech of the players to the central sound-recording room in the basement.
"There's a hum," he said, glancing vaguely toward the ceiling and the arc-lamps.The director, unable to solve or even understand the problem, walks helplessly off the set. "Like lost sheep, the actors and the helpers drifted out after him and the young man of the booth, nodding with satisfaction, picked up his hat and went home."
"What kind of hum?" asked the director.
"Something technical," said the young man. "It's an induced hum. I told 'em they'd have to fix it. This stuff sounds lousy."
Don't worry, lady. You'll find that chop as fresh as on the day it roamed the fields of Iowa. Ain't this a General Electric Refrigerator?Besides employing the flippant, slangy tone that I'm increasingly seeing in advertisements of this era, what the hell is the point of all this? Are they saying that GE fridges will keep their contents cool even when the temperature outside is hot? Are they actually implying that said fridge will survive an apartment fire?
Don't ask silly questions, lady. Sure it's a General Electric -- can't you see the Monitor Top? In the Monitor Top, the nonchalant motor of this astonishing Refrigerator is doubtless idling with its feet perched atop its desk--totally oblivious to the muffled epithets of the perspiring fire department.
Lady--in ten or fifteen hours, when the noble fire brigade has succeeded in drenching the entire back cover of the New Yorker with half of Croton Reservoir, these gallant fire-fighters will open the regrigerator door, and--as is the custom of gallant fire-fighters--they'll "take a little peep inside."
They wouldn't blink an eyelash--since this refrigerator is General Electric--if they found a huddle of sleepy penguins roosting on the topmost shelves. And ice cubes frozen solid--with a happy band of baby walri (walruses) frisking in their midst.
No, lady--it takes more than a mere conflagration to fluster a chop in a General Electric Refrigerator. That's one reason why we think you'd like to own one. You don't like your chops flustered--do you?
