Jump to content

The Hersch

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    2,783

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    23

 Content Type 

Everything posted by The Hersch

  1. The Hersch
    It did, by several years if my memory serves me well. I never thought much of either.
  2. The Hersch
    I dined with friends at the Mochica half of the restaurant this past Sunday. One of my friends had been once before, on a Saturday, and said it had been crowded. It was largely empty on Sunday, at least from 7 pm till about 8:30. We had all three cebiches on the menu and one tiradito (I have no idea what the distinction between them is). Also the fried yuca. Everything was fresh and delicious, and the yuca was so good we got a second plate of it. We had six plates and five cocktails among the three of us, and including tax and tip it came to about $65 each. And we all left satisfied as well as pleased. It's a smooth, cool place, with good service (except for an overenthusiastic busser) and the only thing I'd fault it for is the unnecessarily loud music. If I still lived in the neighborhood I'd probably be in this place once a month or more.
  3. The Hersch
    The area around the Kennedy Center is a wasteland. There is no good dining genuinely close. Have you considered Marcel's pre-theater prix-fixe deal? It's $70 for three courses if you order by 6:30, and it includes car service to and from the Kennedy Center. I've never tried it myself, but you can't get much better dining than Marcel's.
  4. The Hersch
    Don, this (your first couple of paragraphs) is nonsensical, and what I meant when I said I couldn't figure out what you were saying. Of course the film The Maltese Falcon isn't a great work of literature: It's not a work of literature. When you said it isn't a great work of art, and I said oh yes it is, and you responded that you meant it wasn't a great literary work, I couldn't make head or tail of that and still can't. At the same time, of course, Dashiell Hammett's book The Maltese Falcon actually is a great work of literature, and if you haven't read it I suggest you do, as I recommend all of Hammett's work. One of the most original and interesting voices in American letters. Of Tarantino's work, I've seen only Pulp Fiction, and that was enough to convince me I didn't want to see any more of it. I love Casablanca, but it actually is absurd on many levels, even silly, which The Maltese Falcon decidedly is not. Have you seen The African Queen? Bogart received his one (well-deserved) Oscar for it.
  5. The Hersch
    I didn't respond because I couldn't figure out what your comment was supposed to mean. Netflix has streaming episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" for all of season 1. I think they used to have additional seasons, but they don't seem to be there now.
  6. The Hersch
    A friend has suggested dining at Nazca Mochica, a new "contemporary Peruvian" place on P Street in the spaces formerly occupied by Skewers and Café Luna, and then by Heritage India and Malgudi. Downstairs is Mochica, a "pisco and cebiche bar", while upstairs is Nazca, a "contemporary Peruvian restaurant". I had never heard of this place before, and don't know when it opened. Has anyone been?
  7. The Hersch
    If I didn't have a lot of evidence that shows conclusively that you're not an idiot, I would have said that anyone who thinks the 1941 Maltese Falcon is not a great work of art is an idiot. It is one of the finest examples of the film-maker's art ever produced. It's on practically every 100-best list you can find (although such lists also generally include pukefests like It's a Wonderful Life). The script, the cast, the sets, the lighting, the cinematography, the pacing-- all tuned to a point of breath-taking near-perfection. This is one of my favorite movies, all of which are great works of art. I believe in the scene you mention in the original post, Spade is burning a piece of paper that has the Mary Astor character's new address written on it. He burns it presumably because he doesn't want anyone else to see it. (The character was still Miss Wonderly at that point.) I've seen both of the earlier films based on Hammett's novel. The first, also called The Maltese Falcon, is a not-bad little early talkie. Satan Met a Lady is a straight-up stinker.
  8. The Hersch
    I remain skeptical of claims of the antiquity of pizza in the U.S. The 1903 Tribune article is solid evidence of something, but it's much more "how quaint and curious are the practices of these Italian folk" than anything to do with the history of pizza in America. Of all the references to commercial pizza establishments in the 1900s and 1910s that I find online, none seems to have any hard citations, although perhaps some of the sources behind paywalls that I'm unwilling to traverse may have. Yes, perhaps Lombardi's was in business in 1905, but where is the evidence that they were purveyors of anything we would recognize today as pizza, or even that they sold anything they themselves called pizza? Online, I can find only assertions. The 1944 Times article certainly suggests that in that year pizza was a novelty to their readers, and these were New Yorkers, who would generally be exposed to new things from abroad before Americans in other parts of the country. I think it's pretty clear that pizza had not penetrated very far into American food culture before the mid-1940s. As one of some antiquity myself, I can share two memories from my childhood. In 1959, in suburban Washington, when I would have been six years old, I remember a playmate declaring that he liked pizza, but hated pizza pie. (Or it may have been vice-versa.) I have no idea what distinction he drew between them. In 1961, now eight, I was with my family in Naples, where we had a meal at what was claimed, by them, to be the Ur-source of pizza, and remember that everyone agreed that the pizza there was nothing like what we had in the States. I have no recollection of how it may have differed.
  9. The Hersch
    You might consider the singular they, which was good enough for Jane Austen. Fun fact (or possibly conjecture): "Nom de plume" was probably formed in English, by analogy with French nom de guerre, and then exported back to France. Or so says the OED.
  10. The Hersch
    But bear in mind that Mussolini had been deposed in July of 1943, and the provisional government, under the titular leadership of the king, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies that September. Although there would still be a lot of fighting farther north in Italy, the Allies occupied Naples, the cradle of pizza, on October 1, 1943.
  11. The Hersch
    I almost posted this in "Who are you drinking to", but it's probably better here. Maurice White, founder and presiding genius of the group Earth Wind & Fire, died yesterday. They were among the great musical acts of the 1970s. Here's one of their greatest recordings:
  12. The Hersch
    I may have something more substantive to say about this, but I'd like to clarify a detail in the Washington Post article: Jack Johnson's life and career were the basis for The Great White Hope, all right, but it was originally a play by Howard Sackler that premiered at our own Arena Stage in 1967, starring James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander. I saw it during its run there. The production later moved to Broadway with the same cast. A film adaptation was released in 1970, also starring Jones and Alexander.
  13. The Hersch
    Ah, I see. I don't have loyalty cards. My activities are sufficiently tracked without them.
  14. The Hersch
    Can you share with the rest of us where you can get Torpedo for $7.50 per six pack?
  15. The Hersch
    It should also be noted that Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA is probably the best beer I've ever tasted in my life. There are some who deprecate hoppy beers, and I agree that some of the hop-bombs out there are one-dimensional and depressing, but Torpedo has a beautiful balance of malt and hop character, a wonderful, full mouth-feel, a magnificent, persistent head, and a nose and a finish that just sing to me. There is no beer I'd rather drink.
  16. The Hersch
    No, Rod Laver does not have 200 open-era titles. He's probably the overall best male tennis player of all time, including the pre-open and open era, but he has only 102 open-era singles plus doubles titles, while McEnroe has 148, far and away the most for the open era (Jimmy Connors is 2nd with 124).
  17. The Hersch
    Have you any idea how thin is the ice upon which you skate?
  18. The Hersch
    To what do you attribute this apparently new-found ability?
  19. The Hersch
    Most state lines and other boundaries that are based on rivers run down the middle of the river. I don't remember the history of this offhand, but unusually, from colonial times, the line between Maryland and Virginia has always been along the Virginia bank of the Potomac, and this continues to be the case for the line between Washington DC and Virginia. Thus, all of the Potomac adjacent to Washington is part of Washington, as is Roosevelt Island. I seem to recall that at one time National Airport, having been built on landfill out into the Potomac from the Virginia side, was technically in Washington, and even remember many years ago (or perhaps misremember) that an 18-year-old me could get a beer at National but not in Virginia proper. At any rate, the crash of flight 90 was entirely in Washington DC.
  20. The Hersch
    Do you have a citation for this? You could very well be right, but I would have thought that there would have been black patrons in the balcony, with none allowed on the orchestra level beneath. That was certainly a common arrangement in movie theaters in the south during the segregation era, often with a separate entrance at street level for the balcony.
  21. The Hersch
    I just wanted to add that although the owner and the architect both eventually committed suicide, the catastrophe was entirely the builder's fault, through deliberately cutting corners, as it were, when installing the roof. Also, the Knickerbocker was fairly quickly rebuilt and rechristened the Ambassador. In the 1960s, it was briefly repurposed as a sort of Filmore Southeast. The Jimi Hendrix Experience played there several nights running in August of 1967. It was not popular with the neighbors, however, as you may imagine. The Ambassador was torn down in 1969, and replaced with what is now the execrable SunTrust Bank and concrete wasteland that disfigures the southwest corner of 18th Street and Columbia Road. I guess it must have been an NS&T bank when first built. I'd also add that not only was the Knickerbocker Storm the most catastrophic snowstorm in Washington history, the Knickerbocker Theater collapse was the worst disaster, in terms of killed and injured, in Washington history. Realize that in addition to the dead, many of the 133 injured were horribly, appallingly injured. I guess the second-worst disaster was the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 on January 13th, 1982, which some of us will remember vividly, with 78 dead and 9 injured. The 9/11 Pentagon attack took more lives than the Knickerbocker disaster, but was not in Washington.
  22. The Hersch
    You can order morcilla online from La Tienda. As you'll see at the link, they have a bunch of different kinds. Or, you can drive down to their shop in Williamsburg VA.
  23. The Hersch
    In the list of presidents of the Monon, the last one, Samuel T. Brown, was my mother's father's elder brother, my Great-Uncle Sam.
  24. The Hersch
    You might want to seek out the Ric Burns documentary, "The Donner Party", which ran on "The American Experience" in 1992. All of the Burns brothers' documentaries are interchangeable to some extent, but there's lots of interesting stuff in most of them, including this one.
  25. The Hersch
    Well, the lady pictured above was Eliza Sheridan, née Linley, who was married to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the Georgian-era Irish playwright and long-time Whig Member of Parliament. Mrs. Malaprop, who uttered mangled expressions to comic effect, was a character in Sheridan's play The Rivals. A "malapropism" generally involves the use of a word or words similar to but not actually the same as the word or words wanted. "I resemble that remark" is a well-known example. If you're referring to johnb's complaint about "epicenter" I wouldn't call that a malapropism, because it's used deliberately, if foolishly, and has no comic effect. Similarly, if your reference to my "Holy Jesus" rests on the notion that to a Christian, Jesus is by definition holy, then you might characterize "Holy Jesus" as a pleonasm or possibly a tautology, and if any comic effect may have been achieved, it was not through the use of a wrong word. "Holistic Jesus" might be considered a malapropism. In short, I can't figure out the humor in your post.
×
×
  • Create New...