Thanksgiving Feed - Minute Tapioca (1922)

There's something about a food that has to lurk in the shadows. I mean look at that table. It looks like a co-star in Double Indemnity. Somebody died for that tapioca.

Outside of the insanity that's bubble tea, I've never met a person who really likes tapioca. I mean somebody eats it. That or it's another case like the fruitcake where we're all just passing around the same tapioca in an eternal loop of passive aggressiveness. There's just something about foods that come in bead form. I never trusted those beads that used to be in Contact cold capsules either. They just didn't look...well...honest.

Watch the smiles it says, more like watch the grimaces. "Oh lord, Gladys is serving tapioca again...how the hell do I get out of here without making a scene?"

Detective's Office Phase I - Completed!

Well, it took a lot of effort, but with the help of my darling and understanding wife and a lot of sweat and swearing, phase one of establishing my little noir detective's office has been completed. Here are the last photos, from our Memorial Day weekend push.

We start with Sunday and cutting the chair rails to length. Wonderful day for working with the garage door open, though it did keep Kelly from lounging with a glass of wine on the deck. As a bonus, as we were closing down for the night I gave the old ceiling fan one more try and it had magically healed itself. Nice to have house elves with union electrician's licenses! Extra milk on the doorstep tonight, and maybe a little beer too!

We follow up with installing the chair rails, they went up perfectly, the corner joints I sweated were just right. Didn't even need to do any coping. How's that for catching a break?

De-junkified and starting to look like an office again. We moved the desk back to its proper place, took away all of the drop-cloths, stowed the tools, and in this picture I'm in the process of getting the electronics back in place. The floor lamp went to Kelly's office where it has found useful employment.

Beauty shot time. Here's the finished product (so far). My desk with dear Spriggan's bed on one end, no writer should be without a cat after all. Printer stowed inconspicuously in the corner. Cedar chest in its proper place under the window.

The waiting area is ready for the next fem fatal. She had legs that went all the way from her shoes to her hips, that's how she got into the place...

And finally, the dingus.

The Fountain Pen - Inkwells

A recent discussion about dip pens, quills, and refillable fountain pens left me looking for a new accessory, an inkwell. As I've mentioned in previous posts I'm in the process of fashioning my little writer's office into my own Sam Spade-style noir detective's office and that means choosing an inkwell of the appropriate period as well as one with the appropriate nior sensibility.

What is a noir sensibility and, while we're at it, what exactly is noir? According to University Press of Kentucky:

"(Classic film noir) is characterized not only by a constant opposition of light and shadow and a disruptive compositional balance of frames and scenes, but also by dark, foreboding characters and plots and an overriding sense of alienation and moral ambiguity. Noir films reflect the sense of loss, fragmentation, and nihilism at the heart of the human condition in the twentieth century. Although the classic film noir period ended in the late 1950s, its impact on more films has been profound. While typically not black and white, these new films incorporate the noir sensibility of alienation, pessimism, moral ambivalence, and disorientation. This sensibility is obvious in films such as Blade Runner, Reservoir Dogs, Chinatown, and Memento."

This means leaning toward the Art Deco movement's hard, geometric shapes and industrial materials, but there is a complication. Personally, I'm drawn to the fantasy of Art Nouveau with its ornamentation, exuberance, and incorporation of mythological and fantastic creatures. So, to make my office uniquely my own I'm striving to blend the two worlds. And that's how I came to my first serious inkwell crush.

I'm not sure about the age of this bronze Japanese figural inkwell, but I wish I would have found it before the auction closed. It reflects the perfect blend of art and fatalism embodied in noir and I've long collected skulls and memento mori. I guess there's nothing more noir than finding something perfect after it's too late to obtain it. The hunt goes on.

Noir Office Fan

The noir detective’s office has been progressing, albeit slowly and in the background. The latest addition is a little gift provided by two close friends, a Barcol Eight two bladed Bakelite fan.

The Barber-Colman (Barcol) company once was the largest manufacturer in Rockford, IL with a nearly 65 acre facility that made everything from temperature controls to garage door openers. The factory now sits empty, it’s once busy corridors gathering dust. Like in so much of American manufacturing, the well-paying jobs that once fed and clothed a generation have been shipped to third world countries where it can be performed at slave labor rates of pay under sweat shop conditions.

I did an Internet search for Barcol fan ads and came up disappointingly empty. I did turn up a 50’s era garage door opener ad that ran in the Rotarian magazine. Sometimes its striking how much these ads remind me of the suburb where I grew up, right down to the coffered garage doors. This is an image of suburban sprawl before the term carried the negative connotations it’s associated with now. You’re seeing an image of the blue-collar American dream Ozzie and Harriet-style; a three bedroom bungalow on a tree-lined street with a two car garage and a swing set in the backyard.

Dreams die hard, though. That same neighborhood in 2013 is a run-down second-ring suburb. The streets are in disrepair, the sidewalks are cracking and heaving more every winter, and Dutch elm disease or emerald ash borers have killed just about every shade tree. The people who occupy these 50’s bungalows can barely hold on, their dream is to make the mortgage and maybe put away enough to send their kids to college. But I digress.

I stumbled across a page from a 1939 catalog that features the Barcol Eight. It's probably appropriate that the fan which will be stirring the air in my little detective's office is the cheapest model available. Now we'd never consider something like a power switch or speed control as options, but Barcol produced a fan that had neither. You got one speed and if you wanted to turn the fan off you unplugged it and liked it. The trade of was you paid a  whopping $2.35 for your fan. As for my part, I’ll have to perform some minor repairs before plugging my Eight in. It has an iffy cord and the one time I dared plug it into an outlet it made a grinding noise that suggested it might burst into flames. I’m guessing I’ll either be cleaning the motor or replacing it.

 

The Royal #10



The Royal #10 Typewriter

 Ed and Lynn, a pair of good friends who are just back from a Hawaiian trip, made me a gift of an old Royal #10 Typewriter yesterday. It’s a solid old machine, minted in 1933 and weighing in at a good 25 pounds of solid metal, rubber, and glass. It’s a beautiful machine for an era when it took just under 20 hours to fly from coast to coast, construction of the Golden Gate Bridge had just began, and Europe began its slide into World War II. It also was the year Dashiell Hammett wrote The Thin Man, Agatha Christie wrote The Hound of Death, James Hilton wrote Lost Horizon, and Ellery Queen wrote the American Gun Mystery.


The old Royal has weathered the nearly ninety years it’s been existence with a kind of grace that can’t be ascribed to modern consumer products. The iPod I purchased less than a year ago is scratched shows evidence of every grain of grit it’s encountered. The Royal has a few sticky keys and needs a good cleaning as well as a new ribbon, but it’s no worse for nearly reaching its 100th birthday.



I think we had the same typing teacher...

 There’s something about a machine that’s been around as long as my Royal. It has a kind of gravitas, a force of personality that transforms everything it comes in contact with. It even changes the atmosphere, perfuming it with the scent of old machine oil and ink and putting me in mind of my seat in the back of typing class at high school. Apparently, this is an experience that takes me back to the Great Depression. While writing this piece I found a photograph of young men taking typing lessons and if you look at the fellow in the back row, closest to the camera, he's using a Royal #10. This machine takes you back to a more physical time, a time when it took more effort to do anything than it does now. Even typing your name requires reacquainting yourself with the right wrist position and getting a feel for keys that have to be struck with a little force. It has a sound, and I’m not talking about the hushed warble of plastic computer keys. The Royal hammers your thoughts into the paper, indelibly with mistakes embedded in the end result. It clatters and sounds like it ought to eject a hot casing at the end of each line of text. An old typewriter is noir. It embodies all the hard edges and tough truths, mistakes that can only be covered over and periods that will punch right through a manuscript.

The Royal is the latest step in my assembly of a good, old fashioned detective-style office. It goes well with my old, tube-type radio, wing back chairs, and reproduction Craftsman Style desk. Once I make some hard decisions about furnishings, I’ll be painting and putting up wainscoting and eventually getting a single-light door with my name painted on the glass and a brass mail slot. All I need is a brick wall view and neon light seeping in through the blinds and I’m an alcohol addiction and a partner short of turning into Mike Hammer or Sam Spade. I’ll have to resist taking clients and focus on my writing. As Hemingway once said, "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."