If you are in a city of any size, you’ve probably seen them in dry cleaners’ windows. The first time I saw these images, I thought they were honest-to-God representations of people who worked inside. O, the naiveté.
This book is a huge disappointment. It’s a volume in the series Object Lessons, short books devoted to the contemplation of everyday things: barcodes, hyphens, rust. Other volumes in this series might be terrific. But Pencil is not.
When I wrote four sentences about When Strangers Marry (dir. William Castle, 1944), I suggested that the movie has the most consequential mail chute in all film. As the camera closes in, let us pause to ponder a world with five daily mail collections, six days a week. Click any image for a larger view.
Jimmy Cliff’s “You Can Get It If You Really Want” (July 1970) sounds as though it may have been meant — or must have been meant — as a reply to the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (July 1969). And Cliff’s repeated try sounds like a reply to “Satisfaction.” Or am I just hearing things?