Test, test...

I’ve hidden this blog for now.

I've forgotten who said this, but I relate:
I'm always talking about God, "but I don't believe in God."

 

Playing, potentially

More messing around with little toys. The best little toy is tiny golden safety pins – – they exist in a state of latency. Like us, as children – – or, us now, to the extent  we hold onto that state.

Marz brought me that split pencil from Duluth. She has completed her first year in college there, which is quite something! 

"Fresca!"

 I made a mention in Zippy!  comicskingdom.com/zippy-the-pinhead/2025-05-18
Or, my nickname did. (Thanks Michael, for the alert.)

The first person to call me Fresca was an editorial coworker, Jeff Z, in 2003.

Here I am on Camino, 2011--at a tea stop with Ganesh (above me) on the side of the path:

No big walks for me this summer:
I keep reinjuring my knee at work. I've finally started wearing a knee brace there to REMIND MYSELF to be careful.

Not blogging much this month, I've been making more toy assemblages. Yesterday, this saint-on-a-spring, Saint Wobble, the switchboard operator who can connect you to anyone in the spirit world.

Made from a saint statue from work; a phone from Gregg; and a broken piano part from the alley.

Time to catch the bus to work!

Comments off, email welcome.

Italian Song: Jimmy Roselli & Mina

The media volunteer, Jeff, set a pile of LPs on my work table. "Someone donated Italian records. Maybe you know some."

Italian-American, he meant. I doubted it. My father wanted nothing to do with his family background.

I flipped through their soft and dusty covers, and--Jimmy Roselli?
I do know him!
My parents had his album Best of Neopolitan Song. They must have played it a lot, I instantly recognized his voice on youTube.
Why him? We never listened to Frank or Dino or Tony, or Connie.
There's no one left to answer that question.

Roselli grew up in Hoboken, NJ, down the street from Frank Sinatra.
He was never as famous as Sinatra, but "every Italian family in Brooklyn played his records", according to youtube.
Martin Scorsese, (who grew up in lower Manhattan's Little Italy) put Roselli's "Mala Femmina" in his movie Mean Streets (1973).

Here, Roselli sings "Mala Femmina" on the Ed Sullivan Show, 1960.

While I was on the track, I wondered, What was that Italian song played  over and over on the newest Ripley (Netflix 2024) ?

Found it: "Il cielo in una stanza", a 1960 hit in Italy sung by pop star Mina.
(Scorsese also used it too--in Goodfellas. I've never seen it. I learn from youTube comments.)

This is the scene in Ripley:
https://youtu.be/0MiQSrFEkjk?si=HsS08r2-CFLbDcYq&t=22

Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) and Dickie Greenleaf in Naples watch Mina sing "Il cielo in una stanza"  (Mina played by Italian actor Hildegard de Stefano):

Ripley doesn't care for anyone, personally, but he does respond aesthetically. There's nothing funny in the story--(the emotional flatness is a problem in an 8-part series)-- but I did laugh at the faces Ripley makes when he edits a manuscript by Dickie's girlfriend, Marge. Grimacing as he pencils over her writing is one of Ripley's few honest expressions.
A glisten in his eye watching Mina sing is another.

Below:
Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning) and Tom Ripley, from American Cinematographer magazine.
Shot in black and white, the series is beautiful. Too beautiful. Everything, every thing is gorgeous. Too much design, and no dirt. Italy was never this clean.

 
Like Ripley's emotions, the visual affect is flat. I did enjoy the series, but without contrasts, it's a little boring.
Nobody wears dirty old undershirts like in Fellini's Roma (1972).

via

 

[comments off. email welcome.]

Three Dolls???

 Did you see this???

“Trump was asked about how his tariffs on China might lead to higher prices and fewer goods, and he said this about American children:

 “I'm just saying they don't need to have 30 dolls. 

They can have three. 

They don't need to have 250 pencils. 

They can have five.”


________

THREE????

That human is a monster, Penny Cooper says.

The Fence of Silliness

I seem to be taking a blog break,
but wanted to let you know all is well.

I'm in what Wittgenstein called the green valley of silliness*-- continuing my Fence Project: putting prints and toys on the fence that the City erected to keep homeless people out of the little park next to the thrift store.

This week I demobbed a dozen little green army men. . . 

. . .  and tied them up with yarn bows, for easy taking:

Such is my work in the world.
_______________________

*I'd collaged Wittgenstein in the green valley (in 2017). 

noodletoon.blogspot.com/2017/01/wittgensteins-props

This is my favorite: Wittgenstein with a "potted flowering plant", such as is recorded he kept in his college rooms.