Matins

¶ Municipal liability for Newport’s Cliff Walk — they thought that they had settled it, but no. (NYT)

The State Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s decision that Newport was not liable, pointing to an exception in the law that holds landowners responsible for “willful or malicious failure to guard or warn against a dangerous condition” after “discovering the user’s peril.”

In its 3-to-2 decision, the court found that the city had long been aware of the Cliff Walk’s “latent dangers,” including the dirt paths that are in fact erosion trails created by rainwater runoff.

“It is beyond dispute,” the court said in its ruling, “that for many years, the city has had actual notice of the dangerous instability of the ground underneath the Cliff Walk and its eroding edge.”

The ruling found a “haunting similarity” between Mr. Berman’s accident and the 1991 death of Michael Cain, a college student who also stepped from the Cliff Walk onto a patch of ground that gave way and plunged to the rocks. Mr. Cain’s family lost a lawsuit on grounds that he was on the Cliff Walk at 2 a.m., after its closing time, and thus was trespassing.

Although we are wary of the drive to make somebody responsible for everybody else’s problems, we agree with the Court here. Surrounded by Newport’s mansions, which, for the most part, sit on well-tended grounds, it’s cognitively difficult to recognize that those paths leading down to the shore are not paths at all.

While We’re Away

¶ An excellent, inarguable alternative list of “20 Under 40.”   (The Millions)

To be sure, it’s hard to begrudge these 20 terrific writers their honor. We’ve been excited to read in the issue new work from friends (and interested to observe the generational influence exerted by 1999 honoree George Saunders). But, as the accompanying Comment suggests, “to encourage . . . second-guessing is perhaps the best reason to make lists.” And, wishing to see more such second-guessing, we’ve decided to rise to the bait and offer our own, non-overlapping, list of young-ish writers to watch.

¶ Janice Nimura sits on a bench in Carl Schurz Park and remembers the Slocum Disaster, which occurred within view of her perch 96 years ago yesterday.

Six hundred and twenty-two families lost relatives on the General Slocum. Half of the congregation of St. Mark’s Church died. By Memorial Day 1905, more than a quarter of the stricken families had left the neighborhood. By the end of the decade, Little Germany had largely ceased to exist, and thousands of Eastern European Jews had moved in.

Sometime shortly before 1910, my teenaged great-grandfather, a Galician Jew, landed at Ellis Island. A baker, he got married and raised three children at 168 East Second Street, a few blocks from St. Mark’s. Perhaps the previous tenants of his tenement apartment had been parishioners. St. Mark’s shut its doors in 1940, and reopened soon after as a synagogue. The remnants of the congregation merged with Zion Lutheran, on East 84th Street in Yorkville.

We’re sitting in Yorkville now. It’s no longer particularly German. But the Upper East Side, of which Yorkville is the easternmost part, was home to more victims of the Sept. 11 attacks than any other Manhattan neighborhood. Another catastrophe that unfolded on a gorgeous day. Remember the General Slocum today, and ponder the currents of history that are part of the view from one park bench.

¶ At The House Next Door, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard have a very lengthy but extremely interesting conversation about Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve.

JB: Well, I guess I don’t disagree with you that the writing is on-the-nose, at least by contemporary standards. But it is very effective in places, and it remains one of the film’s strengths on the whole. However, as for your charge that “virtually every shot in the film is utilitarian and nothing more,” I wouldn’t disagree. Sure, the last shot stands out, as you noted. And I’ve always rather liked the shot of Eve standing just offstage at the end of one of Margo’s performances, watching her idol taking her bows. And yet, in the context of the rest of the film’s visual blandness, that shot is utilitarian, too, upon further reflection; the only difference is that we’re given something comparatively interesting to look at. So much of All About Eve is nothing more than the actors centered in the frame, barking their lines (some memorable, some not), often in front of rather bland backdrops. And so it is that one of the most memorable shots in the film is the one of Eve and Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) walking down a sidewalk—memorable, alas, because it’s so clumsily staged in front of rear-projection.

Sadly, in terms of the cinematography, that’s not the only time that an oddity stands out. Of late, I’ve been puzzled by a shot at the end of Bill’s not-so-happy welcome-back party: The party sequence ends with Eve saying goodnight to Karen (Celeste Holm) and reminding her to put in a good word for her about becoming Margo’s understudy. Karen, standing at the top of a stairway, assures Eve she won’t forget and then descends the stairs. As soon as Karen leaves the frame, the camera zooms past where she was standing to focus on a painting that had hovered unremarkably over Karen’s shoulder during her conversation with Eve. In a very brief closeup, no longer than a second, we see what appears to be woman sitting in a chair, looking to her right, with figures standing over each shoulder—perhaps an angel over her right shoulder and something that looks almost like a court jester over her left shoulder. The painting is there and gone so quickly that it’s hard to say exactly what it portrays. In fact, right now I’m studying the paused image on my computer screen and I still can’t quite tell what I’m looking at.

It’s entirely possible, of course, that the painting is quite famous. I freely admit that my knowledge of that art form is limited. Furthermore, I recognized Toulouse-Lautrec’s Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret hanging in Margo’s living room (hence, she likes famous art). So perhaps you know exactly what that slow zoom reveals, and maybe I should, too, and maybe that’s why neither of the two commentary tracks on my DVD makes any mention of the zoom or the painting. Then again, unless the painting is as recognizable as Mona Lisa, I find the haste with which Mankiewicz cuts away from the painting, after going through the effort to (a) hang it there and (b) zoom in on it, to be baffling. Giving Mankiewicz the benefit of the doubt—and thanks to my close examination of the painting on my computer—I’ll assume that the painting symbolizes Karen’s place between an angel she sees (Eve) and a kind of demon she doesn’t (Eve again). Still, I think it’s telling that one of Mankiewicz’s few attempts at cinematic storytelling is essentially mumbled.

We couldn’t resist snipping this passage, not only because we disagree with the proposition that All About Eve is boring to look at — our guess is that these fellows don’t get to the theatre very often — but because neither one of them seems to be familiar with Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Mrs Siddons “as the Tragic Muse.” Siddons was the great Eighteenth-Century actress who gave her name to the fictional thespian society whose annual awards dinner serves as a frame for the narrative. 

So, yes, “the painting is quite famous.” It can be seen at the Huntingdon.

Have a Look

¶ The first traffic signal (Detroit, 1912).  (Design Observer)

¶ A big, big “Oops!” moment for schmearer Thomas Kinkade. (World Class Stupid)

¶ Choire Sicha labors in the archives of the New York Times and finds that those things you complain about have been besetting sins at the newspaper since at least a century ago. It’s funny to read the scans of old clippings. (The Awl)

So we’ve taken a long look back at the paper in 1910 and 1911, and found pretty much everything there that people complain about now: it’s beholden to Jews! It’s in bed with the President (even while quick to absolutely trash his daughters). It’s devoted to the stupid trends of the rich (and displays a crazy obsession with rich people and their real estate), it gives away information crucial to public safety, prints thinly sourced gossip, and has an insane op-ed page. And 100 years ago, it already had everyone’s favorite thing: a catty, mean profile of a famous popular singer!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 10:35 am.