Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, With a Thought for Valentine’s Day)

“How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden; and ‘hope, which comes to all,’ outwears the accidents of life.”— Scottish man of letters Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879)

Song Lyric of the Day (World Party, on ‘Avarice and Greed’)

“Avarice and greed are gonna drive you over the endless sea
They will leave you drifting in the shallows
Or drowning in the oceans of history.”—“Ship of Fools,” written by Welsh singer-songwriter Karl Wallinger (1957-2024) and performed by World Party on their Private Revolution CD (1987)

I have to tell you that when it came to this song, I was late to the party—World Party, that is. Since I didn’t have access to MTV in the Eighties, I didn’t see the video for this tune, and the local rock station that I had listened to for more than a decade had become less experimental and more frozen in a classic rock format that downplayed more experimental newer music.

But once in a blue moon in recent years I would hear this on my car radio, and the other day I listened to it again, only this time it struck me with full force. Nearly four decades after its release, Karl Wallinger’s dystopian vision feels more relevant than ever.

“The world is in such a state,” he said in a 2018 interview with Billboard upon release of a new video. “The situation is getting crazy, isn’t it? It’s so ridiculous, this whole situation, mind-blowingly unintelligible.”

Any rational observer could only admit that it’s gotten worse. The “avarice and greed” that Wallinger scored, along with sexual corruption (“Sodom”), lie at the heart of the mushrooming Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

And above all there is the specter of environmental catastrophe. Even the bipartisan agreement that once held sway on the necessity of saving outdoor spaces has vanished. As Stephen Lezac noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, with the rise of the MAGA movement, Donald Trump’s “inner circle consists almost exclusively of hyperonline MAGA ideologues, whose passion for American landscapes generally begins and ends at the golf course. The [Theodore] Roosevelt Republicans are in retreat. The indoor Republicans have arrived.”

Last year he worst of the tech tycoons, Elon Musk, severely hobbled the Environmental Protection Agency through his work at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Just as predictably, his cuts to the Forest Service left it about 38 percent behind its recent pace for forest-thinning, prescribed fire and other work to remove potential wildfire fuel, according to Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group.

“You will pay tomorrow,” Wallinger (who, sadly, died two years ago) promised the oblivious officers of the “Ship of Fools” of the Eighties. Sadly, today’s equivalent seems likely to capsize all of us in their tech Armageddon.

(The image accompanying this post, of World Party performing at The Basement in Columbus, Ohio, was taken on May 26, 2015, by Bob Mateljan.)

Joke of the Day (Fred Allen, on One Man’s Object of Affection)

“The last time I saw him, he was walking down Lover’s Lane, holding his own hand.”—Irish-American radio comedian Fred Allen (1894-1956), quoted by Ivan G. Shreve Jr., “ ‘If Frank Fay Were Acid, He Would Have Consumed Himself’ – Fred Allen,” Thrilling Days of Yesteryear blog, May 2, 2017

It’s said that when the Irish deliver an insult to someone they know well, it’s often a form of endearment. But such was not the case stateside when Fred Allen lobbed this verbal grenade at fellow Irish-American comic Frank Fay.

Fay certainly has a place in entertainment history as the actor who played gentle tippler Elwood P. Dowd in the original 1944 Broadway production of Harvey, and before that as the prototypical stand-up monologuist.

But even in show business, an industry with no shortage of egotists, Fay’s self-regard was thought far beyond the norm. And he was especially scorned as a philanderer and alcoholic who abused his first wife, the rising and highly admired Hollywood star Barbara Stanwyck.

I try to source any quote used here on this blog, but I had a tougher time than usual doing so with this one. (There is a variation on it, by the way: the title of the post that Shreve wrote for his blog.) But I did see the quote used in the Madison State Journal back in October 1960, a year before Fay’s death at age 69, and from all that I have read there seems little doubt that Allen loathed Fay.

I thought of this quote as a rather cynical prelude to Valentine’s Day. No doubt there are many who, as Allen said, are more than happy to stroll down Lover’s Lane by themselves. I’m sure you can think of one such person. So can I. A hint: the right hand that fellow will be holding is probably smeared with heavy beige makeup meant to camouflage questions about why it looks so bruised all the time.

Quote of the Day (Lars-Erik Cederman, on Economics and Ethnic Nationalism)

“[E]thnic nationalism tends to attract the most support from those who have been disadvantaged by globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. Populist demagogues have an easy time exploiting growing socioeconomic inequalities, especially those between states’ geographic centers and their peripheries, and they blame ethnically distinct immigrants or resident minorities. Part of the answer is to retool immigration policies so as to better integrate newcomers. Yet without policies that reduce inequality, populist appeals that depict out-groups as welfare sponges will only gain traction. So governments hoping to amp down ethnic nationalism should set up programs that offer job training to the unemployed in depressed regions, and they should prevent the further hallowing out of welfare programs.”— Swiss-Swedish political scientist Lars-Erik Cederman, “Blood for Soil: The Fatal Temptations of Ethnic Politics,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019

The image of Lars-Erik Cederman that accompanies this post was taken on Nov. 1, 2018, by AliceRuth11.

Quote of the Day (Ginia Bellafante, on the Long-Term Decline of the Department Store)

“If you are in your 20s, department stores have been dying ostensibly for the whole of the time you have been conscious. ‘Lackluster upon lackluster,’ an analyst at Piper Jaffray described the sector in a New Yorker article in 2003 — seven years before Instagram ignited our scrolling addictions, 16 years before the closure of Henri Bendel, 17 before the end of Lord & Taylor and Barneys. The decline might be traced further back, sometime around 1989, when B. Altman shut down on Fifth Avenue. By then, Bloomingdale’s had been abandoned as an urbane meeting ground in romantic comedy (see ‘Manhattan’), replaced by The Sharper Image (see ‘When Harry Met Sally’).”— Fashion critic Ginia Bellafante, “Out of Step With Their Shoppers,” The New York Times, Feb. 8, 2026

The image accompanying this post, looking north across 60th Street at Barneys New York on a cloudy afternoon, was taken on Apr. 17, 2010, by Jim.henderson.

In the mid-1990s, as part of a larger retail tour of New York, I visited Barneys, along with other members of my company and industry marketing researchers. Somebody noticed that my jacket, bought at a more downscale department store, looked an awful lot like one on the racks. It turned out that the merchandise we saw cost seven times more than what I had paid.

In his 2025 memoir, They All Came to Barneys, Gene Pressman depicts the company he managed with his brother Bob as the height of Nineties glamour. Maybe so.

But from that day nearly three decades ago, I became convinced that the store’s merchandise was overpriced. It was a far cry from the discount men’s suit shop his grandfather had founded. When I read the reports of its demise, I figured that pride goeth before a fall.

I was glad that, unlike many casual observers (and even some retail analysts who should have known better), Ginia Bellafonte’s article didn’t attribute the decline of the entire department store sector solely to the Internet.

A single cause is a convenient explanation for everything, but the department store has withered for several reasons, much like the enclosed malls they anchored for decades. I look forward to an entire book that will trace this devolution with the care it deserves.

Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on the Explosive Power of Books)

"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”— American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), The Haunted Bookshop (1919)

This Day in Film History (Birth of Ronald Colman, Sterling Star of Silent and Sound Eras)

Feb. 9, 1891— Ronald Colman, an Oscar-winning actor who personified courtliness from Hollywood’s silent to sound eras, was born in Richmond, England.

Probably because I was annoyed by what seemed like an unduly stiff performance as an amnesiac war casualty in Random Harvest (1942), I was put off for years by Colman. I changed my opinion after watching his world-weary diplomat in Frank Capra’s adaptation of the James Hilton novel Lost Horizon (1937).

But it was his depiction of brilliant, alcoholic, self-sacrificing lawyer Sydney Carton in the 1935 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities that finally convinced me that Colman was a sterling talent, well-deserving of his reputation as one of Hollywood’s best leading men of the 1930s and 1940s.

Understandably, the actor saw this as one of the best roles of his career. Not only did he agree to shave off his trademark mustache to play the part, but, with great good humor, he recited his climactic speech from the film whenever Jack Benny visited him on the comedian’s radio and TV shows.

After a half-century, I think I really should re-watch Random Harvest, which enjoys a reputation as one of the finest romantic melodramas of Hollywood’s golden age. 

Colman himself had been badly wounded in the Great War while serving in the London Scottish Regiment (a legendary unit in which actors Basil Rathbone, Herbert Marshall, and Claude Rains had their own harrowing experiences, as related in this 2015 post on the “Sister Celluloid” blog).

The war was as psychologically as physically devastating, as Colman recalled later:

“I won’t go into the war and all that it did to all of us. We went out. Strangers came back. It was the war that made an actor out of me. When I came back that was all I was good for: acting. I wasn’t my own man anymore.”

Undoubtedly, it was Colman’s identification with the traumatized veteran in Random Harvest that helped him overcome an often far-fetched script—and win an Oscar nomination.

The war did not end Colman’s travails. Determined to appear on the New York stage, he initially encountered a long period of unemployment, to such an extent that he was reduced to scrounging for food. (“Figuring out the best way to spend five cents in an automat was an art at which I became adept. Doughnuts were the main standby.”) At last he broke through.

Colman found film to be the real where he would make his mark, however, when director Henry King cast him opposite Lillian Gish in the 1923 silent film The White Sister. The film was so successful that the trio reunited for Romola the following year.

Unlike many silent-film idols, Colman had no trouble adapting to sound. In fact, the new technology enhanced his career because he could take advantage of his distinctive voice: rich, cultured, mellifluous, enhancing his image as an English gentleman.

“Colman only really hit one note with it, a sort of wistful oboe note, but that note was enough if the writing of the picture suited his restrained lyricism,” wrote Dan Callahan in an October 2025 post on his “Stolen Holiday” blog.

No matter what genre he tried—western, melodrama, detective film, romantic comedy—Colman’s gentlemanly persona was tinged with melancholy, a trait of his off-screen temperament. That sense was reinforced early in his career because of a disastrous first marriage.

Colman wed Thelma Raye in haste in 1920, a union he came to rue as, stricken with jealousy at his increasing success, the actress took to stalking him. Increasingly withdrawn under this pressure, Colman was relieved when she sued him for divorce 14 years later. Fortunately his second marriage, to Benita Hume, was longer (20 years, until his death) and far happier.

To the greatest extent possible, Colman tried to live with discretion, so the public knew little of his private circumstances. What it saw onscreen, it loved. In addition to the films I mentioned previously, I also enjoyed him in The Talk of the Town (1942), a comedy in which his straitlaced lawyer risks his nomination to the Supreme Court by aiding an escaped convict whose innocence he comes to believe in.

With his fourth Oscar nomination in 1947 for A Double Life, Colman finally won formal recognition from his peers by winning the coveted statuette, as a Shakespearean actor whose latest role—the jealousy-maddened Othello—begins to mirror his own life.

(A recent biographer of Colman, the prolific Carl Rollyson, has a astute analysis of the actor’s “graceful, literate masculinity” in this Spring 2024 article for Humanities, a journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)