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First, the slideshow.
Then the article: Cups of New York.
Urban History to Go: Black, No Sugar
By JOHN FREEMAN GILL
One morning a dozen years ago, a sculptor named Rodger Stevens got on a subway at 116th Street and Broadway and had what he calls a "Twilight Zone" moment. Everyone in the train seemed to be holding a paper coffee cup, and every cup was white, with no image or words whatsoever. The effect was so striking, Mr. Stevens said, "it was as if no one had eyebrows."
Suddenly, he was stricken with fear that New York's iconic Greek blue-and-white coffee cup - the one adorned with the words "We Are Happy to Serve You" and the trio of steaming mustard-yellow cups flanked by tall Grecian jars - was on the verge of extinction.
Horrified, Mr. Stevens began assiduously collecting - or, more precisely, not discarding - as many different cups as he could find. Even after realizing that his panic had been premature, he continued adding to his collection. Today he has about 100 cups representing more than 50 distinct New York varieties, which he keeps in a glass-doored display case in his apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
To Mr. Stevens, the cups represent a kind of overlooked New York. Or, as he put it, if one regards the skyline as a silhouette of the city's body: "These little cups are its distinctive birthmarks. They are all little bits of proof that this is New York and not someplace else."
Mr. Stevens is a native New Yorker, raised in Bay Ridge, and the idea that the unglamorous deli cups he had grown up with would be replaced by upscale white ones featuring sleek coffeehouse logos struck him as "something akin to plastic surgery, an eradication of blemishes that might denote age or a certain, lower status."
Then he just got hooked. Once he began collecting cups, he discovered that there was not just one Greek-themed New York cup but a great many. Soon he was as obsessed with observing the minute differences among his specimens as any collector of orchids or roses.
The classic "We Are Happy to Serve You" cup, Mr. Stevens believes, is the progenitor of all the current cups. The design dates to the mid-1960's, when the Sherri Cup Company of Kensington, Conn., designed it to appeal to the hundreds of Greek coffee shops then operating in the city. The cup was named Anthora, a muddled version of Amphora, the Greek word for the ancient jars depicted in its design.
"Sherri Cup used to be the only one," said Elisa Deixler, co-owner of Zahner's Cash and Carry, a 50-year-old restaurant supply wholesaler in Woodside, Queens. "Then they all jumped on board. Now you have all the major cup companies from across the country making them. If they want to sell in the New York market, they need to have a Greek design."
The Anthora, which comes in 8- and 10-ounce sizes, has always been a New York cup, and it remains a strong seller. The Solo Cup Company, an Illinois firm that now owns the design, produces about 200 million Anthora cups each year, said Angie Chaplin, a Solo spokeswoman. The Anthora is sold almost exclusively in the New York region.
Mr. Stevens owns dozens of latter-day versions of the Anthora, which he terms varietals, although the nonspecialist might call them knock-offs.
In these descendents of the ur-cup, amphoras morph into columns, the pattern of the Greek frieze is altered, the shield holding the cup's aphorism changes shape, and the words themselves recombine into dazzlingly unoriginal combinations: "We Are Pleased to Serve You," "It's Our Pleasure to Serve You," "Serving You Is a Pleasure." In one version, the prototypical New York cup becomes even more local, with each amphora replaced by the Statue of Liberty.
Another long-running Greek cup is a blue-and-white design depicting a discus thrower. This design is manufactured by Premier Cup, a Westchester company, and when you call the "800" number on the cup, the phone will be answered by Arnie Baum, Premier's president. Mr. Baum will inform you that the company's discus thrower dates back to 1966 or 1967, adding that Premier still sells more than a million a month, mostly in the New York metropolitan area.
Mr. Stevens's collection is not the first to include the discus thrower. In 1995, Mr. Baum was asked to donate one of the cups to an exhibition called "The Persistence of Classicism" at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.
"So I go up there," he recalled, "and I go into this room, and they've got all these pieces of artwork and sculpture and these Greek vases and urns and stuff, and sitting there, literally under glass on a pedestal, was this one paper coffee cup."
In New York's delis and greasy spoons, however, a shift away from the classical Greek-themed cup was already in progress. Greek dominance of the coffee shop industry was diminishing, while the arrival of Starbucks in New York in 1994, and its rapid expansion to about 185 cafes in the city, put pressure on the city's delis and diners to offer their takeout coffee in a tonier package.
In the 70's and 80's, Greek designs were the standard. "Now, a lot of businesses are trying to move away from it," said Ms. Deixler of Zahner's Cash and Carry. "Everybody's trying to look a little bit upscale."
In the mid- to late 1990's, Mr. Stevens noticed a blizzard of cups with an "I Love New York" theme, a trend that accelerated after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which also gave rise to cups bearing American flags and other patriotic themes. Soon afterward, a rash of red, white, and blue advertising appeared on coffee cups, promoting companies like New York Waterway and MetLife.
ALONG the way, Mr. Stevens recalled, coffee cups shook off some of their traditional blue-collar grunginess and got hip. The Anthora image popped up on change purses in Brooklyn boutiques and on ceramic mugs at museum gift shops. In 2002, Ryan McGinness, the New York whiz kid of street-smart graphic design, created a set of 10 white cups decorated with clusters of quirky blue images.
"If ever there was a transition from the crusty old cabdriving, smoking New York guy to the young, cutting-edge hipster kid embracing that as his own, that seemed to be the bridge cup," Mr. Stevens said. "I thought that was an important cup."
For all the recent changes, cup makers estimate that Greek motifs continue to adorn up to 40 percent of 10-ounce cardboard cups in New York. But Mr. Stevens believes that the Greek designs will ultimately come to represent a bygone aesthetic, like bell-bottoms or tail fins.
"I have this fantasy of showing up at the Smithsonian some day," he said. "And I'll say, 'Here's my U-Haul,' and they'll see these are an art form that were just tattooed to the body of New York City, so much so that people didn't even notice it. And they'll say: 'That's so interesting. We don't do that anymore. Who ever heard of drinking coffee from a Greek paper coffee cup?'"
An article on movies of yore. That doesn't do this article justice.
Here's Looking at You, 103rd Street
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
EVERY actor has his calling card, his inimitable, unmistakable badge of identity. For Humphrey Bogart, fans would say, it was the trench coat, the fedora, the lisp and the toast, "Here's looking at you, kid," growled at Ingrid Bergman with just the right measure of affection and stoicism. For Gary Dennis, the owner of Movie Place, one of the West Side's last remaining independent video stores, it's the Dean Martin wardrobe and the greeting "Helloo, Moovie Place!" delivered in a throaty basso that sounds as if it has been practiced in the shower.
"No actor could get away with that now," Mr. Dennis says of the Bogart line, which has grown understandably hoary with repetition. "The closest might be Harrison Ford, in 'Blade Runner,' but it's not the same."
In its way, Mr. Dennis's delivery is also peerless, his spin on his old fantasy of being a game show host. "What a job!" he says. "You know, the guy who used to be on 'The Price is Right,' and say, 'Come on down!' "
Ed Herlihy, Ed McMahon, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Humphrey Bogart. Those are some of Mr. Dennis's show business heroes, and what better way to worship them than from his perch at the helm of Movie Place, where you may never be able to find the latest Jim Carrey flick, at least not checked in, but where you can get the complete works of Fellini, "Sailor Moon" and all but the seventh season of "M*A*S*H," because, in his opinion, it was a bad season?
•
Last month, customers noticed a petition on the counter of the video store, which is tucked away in the second floor of a brownstone at 105th Street, off Broadway. The petition calls for a plaque to be placed at 245 West 103rd Street, the brownstone where Bogart spent his "formative years," as the petition puts it, and asks that the block be named after him. Significantly, for an impressionable young movie buff, Mr. Dennis, who is 44, spent his formative years living in an apartment half a block away, at 103rd Street and West End Avenue.
The Bogart family's links with the house began in 1898, when a wealthy surgeon named Belmont DeForest Bogart moved there with his wife, Maud, a suffragist and illustrator. Their son Humphrey was born the following year and attended the Trinity School on West 91st Street, before going to boarding school, from which he was subsequently expelled. About 1925, records indicate, the Bogart family moved to the Upper East Side.
Still, Mr. Dennis suspects that Bogart returned to the old neighborhood. How else to explain why Mr. Kay, who ran a barbershop on 103rd and Broadway from the 1950's until he retired in 1996, claimed to have given Bogart a trim and shave? One can only speculate, since Mr. Kay, whose real name was Kyriacos Demetriou, died in 1999, and Mr. Dennis would never have the temerity to ask Lauren Bacall, Bogart's widow, about any of this.
These days, the brownstones on West 103rd Street are no longer luxury dwellings but city-owned low-income housing. On a recent visit, no one was home at No. 245, but at No. 243, a resident named Dessa Mendez showed off the grassy communal backyards and said she was grateful to be there, paying $117 a month in rent.
•
It was a Movie Place customer, Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, who encouraged Mr. Dennis to draw up the petition. He is aiming for 1,000 signatures, and is halfway there. But that's not all. To change a street name, the community board must pass a resolution, and the City Council must pass a law. Putting up a modest plaque is up to the discretion of the building owner, in this case the Housing Authority. Plaques on public housing are not unprecedented, though hard numbers are hard to come by. There is a plaque where home plate used to be at the Polo Grounds Houses in Harlem; one commemorating 9/11 at Pink Houses in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn; and one marking the site of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum at Kingsborough Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
But plaques for movie stars? "Oh, I seriously doubt that there are any," says Howard Marder, an agency spokesman.
So Bogey, child of privilege turned archetypal urban tough guy, could be a first. Perfect. Not that New Yorkers pay attention. If they did, maybe more of them could pass the Movie Place employment test, which demands knowledge of directors, actors, genres and Alfred Hitchcock's oeuvre.
Mr. Dennis is often disappointed by the results. Asked to name a film starring Joan Crawford, aspiring video clerks all too often write, "Mommie Dearest." Many people turn the test in blank.
There are still a few, however, who are, shall we say, overqualified. "They're a little nutty," he says. "I mean, would I hire me?"
One on King of the Hill and politics.
'King of the Hill' Democrats?
By MATT BAI
Correction Appended
If you watch a lot of cable news, by now you've probably heard someone refer to a bloc of voters known as '' 'South Park' conservatives.'' The term comes from the title of a new book by Brian C. Anderson, a conservative pundit who adapted it from the writer Andrew Sullivan, and it refers to the notion that Comedy Central's obscene spoof of life in small-town America, with its hilarious skewering of liberal snobbery, is somehow the perfect crucible for understanding a new breed of brash and irreverent Republican voters. In truth, aside from its title, Anderson's book has very little to say about ''South Park'' itself; it's really just a retread of the argument that the mainstream media is losing its grip on world domination, marketed rather cynically to appeal to the same red-state radio hosts and book clubs that make so many right-wing polemics best sellers.
If politicians and pundits are really so desperate to understand the values of conservative America without leaving their living rooms, then they should start setting the TiVo to record another animated sitcom, which Anderson mentions only in passing and which, despite its general policy of eschewing politics, somehow continues to offer the most subtle and complex portrayal of small-town voters on television: ''King of the Hill,'' on Fox. North Carolina's two-term Democratic governor, Mike Easley, is so obsessed with the show that he instructs his pollster to separate the state's voters into those who watch ''King of the Hill'' and those who don't so he can find out whether his arguments on social and economic issues are making sense to the sitcom's fans.
For those who have somehow missed ''King of the Hill'' during its nine-year run, here's a lightning-quick primer: It revolves around a classic American everyman, the earnest Hank Hill, who sells ''propane and propane accessories'' in the small town of Arlen, Tex. Hank lives with his wife, Peggy, a substitute Spanish teacher who can't really speak Spanish, and his son, Bobby, a sensitive class clown who exhibits none of his father's manliness. (''This is a carburetor,'' Hank tells his son. ''Take it apart, put it back together; repeat until you're normal.'')
The important thing here is that Hank Hill may be a Texan, but he and his friends could live in any of the fast-developing rural and exurban areas around Columbus or Phoenix or Atlanta that are bound to become the political weathervanes of the new century. The families in Arlen buy American-made pickups, eat at chain restaurants, maniacally water their lawns and do their shopping at the huge Mega Lo Mart. This could easily be the setup for a mean parody about rural life in America, in the same vein as ''South Park,'' but ''King of the Hill,'' which was created by Mike Judge (who is the voice of Hank and who also created ''Beavis and Butt-head''), has never been so crass. The show's central theme has always been transformation -- economic, demographic and cultural. Hank embodies all the traditional conservative values of those Americans who, as Bill Clinton famously put it, ''work hard and play by the rules.'' He's a proud gun owner and a Nascar fan. When Bobby announces that he has landed a job selling soda at the track, Hank solemnly responds, ''If you weren't my son, I'd hug you.''
As Arlen becomes more built up and more diverse, however, Hank finds himself struggling to adapt to new phenomena: art galleries and yoga studios, latte-sipping parents who ask their kids to call them by their first names and encourage them to drink responsibly. The show gently pokes fun at liberal and conservative stereotypes, but the real point is not to eviscerate so much as to watch Hank struggle mightily to adapt to a world of political correctness and moral ambiguity. When Peggy tells him he'll look like a racist for snubbing his Laotian neighbor, Hank replies, ''What the hell kind of country is this where I can only hate a man if he's white?'' And yet, like a lot of the basically conservative voters you meet in rural America -- and here's where Democrats should pay close attention -- Hank never professes an explicit party loyalty, and he and his buddies who sip beer in the alley don't talk like their fellow Texan Tom DeLay. If Hank votes Republican, it's because, as a voter who cares about religious and rural values, he probably doesn't see much choice. But Hank and his neighbors resemble many independent voters, open to proposals that challenge their assumptions about the world, as long as those ideas don't come from someone who seems to disrespect what they believe.
The composition of the audience for ''King of the Hill'' is telling. You might expect that a spoof of a small-town propane salesman and his beer-drinking buddies would attract mostly urban intellectuals, with their highly developed sense of irony. In fact, as Governor Easley long ago realized, the show's primary viewer looks a lot like Hank Hill. According to Nielsen Media Research, the largest group of ''King of the Hill'' viewers is made up of men between the ages of 18 and 49, and almost a quarter of those men own pickup trucks. ''This is only the second show that's a comedy about the South -- this and 'Andy Griffith' -- that doesn't make fun of Southerners,'' Easley told me recently, adding that Hank and his neighbors remind him of the people he grew up with in the hills near Greenville. (Which is probably why Easley does startlingly good impressions of the various characters, including the verbally challenged Boomhauer.)
Easley polls surprisingly well for a Democrat among these voters, and he says he thinks that understanding the show's viewers might resolve some of the mysteries confronting his party about the vast swaths of red on the electoral map. Easley is reasonably progressive -- he raised taxes during his first term to protect education spending -- but he's also known as a guy who cracked up a race car during a spin on a Nascar course. When the governor, a former prosecutor, prepares to make his case on a partisan issue, he likes to imagine that he's explaining his position to Hank -- an exercise that might be useful for his colleagues in Washington too. For instance, Easley told me that Hank would never support a budget like the one North Carolina's Senate recently passed, which would drop some 65,000 mostly elderly citizens from the Medicaid rolls; Hank, after all, has pitched in to support his own father, a brutish war veteran, and he would never condone a community's walking away from its ailing parents. Similarly, Hank may be a lover of the environment -- he was furious when kids trashed the local campground -- but he resents self-righteous environmentalists like the ones who forced Arlen to install those annoying low-flow toilets. Voters like Hank, if they had heard about it on the evening news, would have supported Easley's ''Clean Smokestacks'' law, which forced North Carolina's coal-powered electric plants to burn cleaner, but only because industry was a partner in the final bill, rather than its target.
If other Democrats want to learn from ''King of the Hill,'' they may need to act fast. John Altschuler, one of the show's executive producers, fears that the show's 10th season next year could be its last; despite decent ratings, Fox has been buying fewer episodes and shifting its time slot, and there are rumors that the network may want to substitute yet another new reality show in its place. This is odd: after all, there is more reality about American life in five minutes of ''King of the Hill'' than in a full season of watching Paris Hilton prance around a farm in high heels. But none of this would come as much of a surprise to Hank Hill and his neighbors, who realized long ago that, as a nation, we often discard the things we once cherished in favor of a more synthetic modernity. ''The only place you can find a Main Street these days is in Disneyland,'' Hank once said. ''And just try to buy a gun there.''
Matt Bai, a contributing writer for the magazine, is writing a book about the future of the Democrats.
Correction: June 26, 2005, Sunday:
An essay in The Times Magazine today about the animated television series "King of the Hill," and what politicians, especially Democrats, could learn from it, misidentifies the hometown of Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina, an ardent fan. He grew up in Rocky Mount, not in the hills near Greenville.
Then the article: Cups of New York.
Urban History to Go: Black, No Sugar
By JOHN FREEMAN GILL
One morning a dozen years ago, a sculptor named Rodger Stevens got on a subway at 116th Street and Broadway and had what he calls a "Twilight Zone" moment. Everyone in the train seemed to be holding a paper coffee cup, and every cup was white, with no image or words whatsoever. The effect was so striking, Mr. Stevens said, "it was as if no one had eyebrows."
Suddenly, he was stricken with fear that New York's iconic Greek blue-and-white coffee cup - the one adorned with the words "We Are Happy to Serve You" and the trio of steaming mustard-yellow cups flanked by tall Grecian jars - was on the verge of extinction.
Horrified, Mr. Stevens began assiduously collecting - or, more precisely, not discarding - as many different cups as he could find. Even after realizing that his panic had been premature, he continued adding to his collection. Today he has about 100 cups representing more than 50 distinct New York varieties, which he keeps in a glass-doored display case in his apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
To Mr. Stevens, the cups represent a kind of overlooked New York. Or, as he put it, if one regards the skyline as a silhouette of the city's body: "These little cups are its distinctive birthmarks. They are all little bits of proof that this is New York and not someplace else."
Mr. Stevens is a native New Yorker, raised in Bay Ridge, and the idea that the unglamorous deli cups he had grown up with would be replaced by upscale white ones featuring sleek coffeehouse logos struck him as "something akin to plastic surgery, an eradication of blemishes that might denote age or a certain, lower status."
Then he just got hooked. Once he began collecting cups, he discovered that there was not just one Greek-themed New York cup but a great many. Soon he was as obsessed with observing the minute differences among his specimens as any collector of orchids or roses.
The classic "We Are Happy to Serve You" cup, Mr. Stevens believes, is the progenitor of all the current cups. The design dates to the mid-1960's, when the Sherri Cup Company of Kensington, Conn., designed it to appeal to the hundreds of Greek coffee shops then operating in the city. The cup was named Anthora, a muddled version of Amphora, the Greek word for the ancient jars depicted in its design.
"Sherri Cup used to be the only one," said Elisa Deixler, co-owner of Zahner's Cash and Carry, a 50-year-old restaurant supply wholesaler in Woodside, Queens. "Then they all jumped on board. Now you have all the major cup companies from across the country making them. If they want to sell in the New York market, they need to have a Greek design."
The Anthora, which comes in 8- and 10-ounce sizes, has always been a New York cup, and it remains a strong seller. The Solo Cup Company, an Illinois firm that now owns the design, produces about 200 million Anthora cups each year, said Angie Chaplin, a Solo spokeswoman. The Anthora is sold almost exclusively in the New York region.
Mr. Stevens owns dozens of latter-day versions of the Anthora, which he terms varietals, although the nonspecialist might call them knock-offs.
In these descendents of the ur-cup, amphoras morph into columns, the pattern of the Greek frieze is altered, the shield holding the cup's aphorism changes shape, and the words themselves recombine into dazzlingly unoriginal combinations: "We Are Pleased to Serve You," "It's Our Pleasure to Serve You," "Serving You Is a Pleasure." In one version, the prototypical New York cup becomes even more local, with each amphora replaced by the Statue of Liberty.
Another long-running Greek cup is a blue-and-white design depicting a discus thrower. This design is manufactured by Premier Cup, a Westchester company, and when you call the "800" number on the cup, the phone will be answered by Arnie Baum, Premier's president. Mr. Baum will inform you that the company's discus thrower dates back to 1966 or 1967, adding that Premier still sells more than a million a month, mostly in the New York metropolitan area.
Mr. Stevens's collection is not the first to include the discus thrower. In 1995, Mr. Baum was asked to donate one of the cups to an exhibition called "The Persistence of Classicism" at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.
"So I go up there," he recalled, "and I go into this room, and they've got all these pieces of artwork and sculpture and these Greek vases and urns and stuff, and sitting there, literally under glass on a pedestal, was this one paper coffee cup."
In New York's delis and greasy spoons, however, a shift away from the classical Greek-themed cup was already in progress. Greek dominance of the coffee shop industry was diminishing, while the arrival of Starbucks in New York in 1994, and its rapid expansion to about 185 cafes in the city, put pressure on the city's delis and diners to offer their takeout coffee in a tonier package.
In the 70's and 80's, Greek designs were the standard. "Now, a lot of businesses are trying to move away from it," said Ms. Deixler of Zahner's Cash and Carry. "Everybody's trying to look a little bit upscale."
In the mid- to late 1990's, Mr. Stevens noticed a blizzard of cups with an "I Love New York" theme, a trend that accelerated after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which also gave rise to cups bearing American flags and other patriotic themes. Soon afterward, a rash of red, white, and blue advertising appeared on coffee cups, promoting companies like New York Waterway and MetLife.
ALONG the way, Mr. Stevens recalled, coffee cups shook off some of their traditional blue-collar grunginess and got hip. The Anthora image popped up on change purses in Brooklyn boutiques and on ceramic mugs at museum gift shops. In 2002, Ryan McGinness, the New York whiz kid of street-smart graphic design, created a set of 10 white cups decorated with clusters of quirky blue images.
"If ever there was a transition from the crusty old cabdriving, smoking New York guy to the young, cutting-edge hipster kid embracing that as his own, that seemed to be the bridge cup," Mr. Stevens said. "I thought that was an important cup."
For all the recent changes, cup makers estimate that Greek motifs continue to adorn up to 40 percent of 10-ounce cardboard cups in New York. But Mr. Stevens believes that the Greek designs will ultimately come to represent a bygone aesthetic, like bell-bottoms or tail fins.
"I have this fantasy of showing up at the Smithsonian some day," he said. "And I'll say, 'Here's my U-Haul,' and they'll see these are an art form that were just tattooed to the body of New York City, so much so that people didn't even notice it. And they'll say: 'That's so interesting. We don't do that anymore. Who ever heard of drinking coffee from a Greek paper coffee cup?'"
An article on movies of yore. That doesn't do this article justice.
Here's Looking at You, 103rd Street
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
EVERY actor has his calling card, his inimitable, unmistakable badge of identity. For Humphrey Bogart, fans would say, it was the trench coat, the fedora, the lisp and the toast, "Here's looking at you, kid," growled at Ingrid Bergman with just the right measure of affection and stoicism. For Gary Dennis, the owner of Movie Place, one of the West Side's last remaining independent video stores, it's the Dean Martin wardrobe and the greeting "Helloo, Moovie Place!" delivered in a throaty basso that sounds as if it has been practiced in the shower.
"No actor could get away with that now," Mr. Dennis says of the Bogart line, which has grown understandably hoary with repetition. "The closest might be Harrison Ford, in 'Blade Runner,' but it's not the same."
In its way, Mr. Dennis's delivery is also peerless, his spin on his old fantasy of being a game show host. "What a job!" he says. "You know, the guy who used to be on 'The Price is Right,' and say, 'Come on down!' "
Ed Herlihy, Ed McMahon, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Humphrey Bogart. Those are some of Mr. Dennis's show business heroes, and what better way to worship them than from his perch at the helm of Movie Place, where you may never be able to find the latest Jim Carrey flick, at least not checked in, but where you can get the complete works of Fellini, "Sailor Moon" and all but the seventh season of "M*A*S*H," because, in his opinion, it was a bad season?
•
Last month, customers noticed a petition on the counter of the video store, which is tucked away in the second floor of a brownstone at 105th Street, off Broadway. The petition calls for a plaque to be placed at 245 West 103rd Street, the brownstone where Bogart spent his "formative years," as the petition puts it, and asks that the block be named after him. Significantly, for an impressionable young movie buff, Mr. Dennis, who is 44, spent his formative years living in an apartment half a block away, at 103rd Street and West End Avenue.
The Bogart family's links with the house began in 1898, when a wealthy surgeon named Belmont DeForest Bogart moved there with his wife, Maud, a suffragist and illustrator. Their son Humphrey was born the following year and attended the Trinity School on West 91st Street, before going to boarding school, from which he was subsequently expelled. About 1925, records indicate, the Bogart family moved to the Upper East Side.
Still, Mr. Dennis suspects that Bogart returned to the old neighborhood. How else to explain why Mr. Kay, who ran a barbershop on 103rd and Broadway from the 1950's until he retired in 1996, claimed to have given Bogart a trim and shave? One can only speculate, since Mr. Kay, whose real name was Kyriacos Demetriou, died in 1999, and Mr. Dennis would never have the temerity to ask Lauren Bacall, Bogart's widow, about any of this.
These days, the brownstones on West 103rd Street are no longer luxury dwellings but city-owned low-income housing. On a recent visit, no one was home at No. 245, but at No. 243, a resident named Dessa Mendez showed off the grassy communal backyards and said she was grateful to be there, paying $117 a month in rent.
•
It was a Movie Place customer, Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, who encouraged Mr. Dennis to draw up the petition. He is aiming for 1,000 signatures, and is halfway there. But that's not all. To change a street name, the community board must pass a resolution, and the City Council must pass a law. Putting up a modest plaque is up to the discretion of the building owner, in this case the Housing Authority. Plaques on public housing are not unprecedented, though hard numbers are hard to come by. There is a plaque where home plate used to be at the Polo Grounds Houses in Harlem; one commemorating 9/11 at Pink Houses in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn; and one marking the site of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum at Kingsborough Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
But plaques for movie stars? "Oh, I seriously doubt that there are any," says Howard Marder, an agency spokesman.
So Bogey, child of privilege turned archetypal urban tough guy, could be a first. Perfect. Not that New Yorkers pay attention. If they did, maybe more of them could pass the Movie Place employment test, which demands knowledge of directors, actors, genres and Alfred Hitchcock's oeuvre.
Mr. Dennis is often disappointed by the results. Asked to name a film starring Joan Crawford, aspiring video clerks all too often write, "Mommie Dearest." Many people turn the test in blank.
There are still a few, however, who are, shall we say, overqualified. "They're a little nutty," he says. "I mean, would I hire me?"
One on King of the Hill and politics.
'King of the Hill' Democrats?
By MATT BAI
Correction Appended
If you watch a lot of cable news, by now you've probably heard someone refer to a bloc of voters known as '' 'South Park' conservatives.'' The term comes from the title of a new book by Brian C. Anderson, a conservative pundit who adapted it from the writer Andrew Sullivan, and it refers to the notion that Comedy Central's obscene spoof of life in small-town America, with its hilarious skewering of liberal snobbery, is somehow the perfect crucible for understanding a new breed of brash and irreverent Republican voters. In truth, aside from its title, Anderson's book has very little to say about ''South Park'' itself; it's really just a retread of the argument that the mainstream media is losing its grip on world domination, marketed rather cynically to appeal to the same red-state radio hosts and book clubs that make so many right-wing polemics best sellers.
If politicians and pundits are really so desperate to understand the values of conservative America without leaving their living rooms, then they should start setting the TiVo to record another animated sitcom, which Anderson mentions only in passing and which, despite its general policy of eschewing politics, somehow continues to offer the most subtle and complex portrayal of small-town voters on television: ''King of the Hill,'' on Fox. North Carolina's two-term Democratic governor, Mike Easley, is so obsessed with the show that he instructs his pollster to separate the state's voters into those who watch ''King of the Hill'' and those who don't so he can find out whether his arguments on social and economic issues are making sense to the sitcom's fans.
For those who have somehow missed ''King of the Hill'' during its nine-year run, here's a lightning-quick primer: It revolves around a classic American everyman, the earnest Hank Hill, who sells ''propane and propane accessories'' in the small town of Arlen, Tex. Hank lives with his wife, Peggy, a substitute Spanish teacher who can't really speak Spanish, and his son, Bobby, a sensitive class clown who exhibits none of his father's manliness. (''This is a carburetor,'' Hank tells his son. ''Take it apart, put it back together; repeat until you're normal.'')
The important thing here is that Hank Hill may be a Texan, but he and his friends could live in any of the fast-developing rural and exurban areas around Columbus or Phoenix or Atlanta that are bound to become the political weathervanes of the new century. The families in Arlen buy American-made pickups, eat at chain restaurants, maniacally water their lawns and do their shopping at the huge Mega Lo Mart. This could easily be the setup for a mean parody about rural life in America, in the same vein as ''South Park,'' but ''King of the Hill,'' which was created by Mike Judge (who is the voice of Hank and who also created ''Beavis and Butt-head''), has never been so crass. The show's central theme has always been transformation -- economic, demographic and cultural. Hank embodies all the traditional conservative values of those Americans who, as Bill Clinton famously put it, ''work hard and play by the rules.'' He's a proud gun owner and a Nascar fan. When Bobby announces that he has landed a job selling soda at the track, Hank solemnly responds, ''If you weren't my son, I'd hug you.''
As Arlen becomes more built up and more diverse, however, Hank finds himself struggling to adapt to new phenomena: art galleries and yoga studios, latte-sipping parents who ask their kids to call them by their first names and encourage them to drink responsibly. The show gently pokes fun at liberal and conservative stereotypes, but the real point is not to eviscerate so much as to watch Hank struggle mightily to adapt to a world of political correctness and moral ambiguity. When Peggy tells him he'll look like a racist for snubbing his Laotian neighbor, Hank replies, ''What the hell kind of country is this where I can only hate a man if he's white?'' And yet, like a lot of the basically conservative voters you meet in rural America -- and here's where Democrats should pay close attention -- Hank never professes an explicit party loyalty, and he and his buddies who sip beer in the alley don't talk like their fellow Texan Tom DeLay. If Hank votes Republican, it's because, as a voter who cares about religious and rural values, he probably doesn't see much choice. But Hank and his neighbors resemble many independent voters, open to proposals that challenge their assumptions about the world, as long as those ideas don't come from someone who seems to disrespect what they believe.
The composition of the audience for ''King of the Hill'' is telling. You might expect that a spoof of a small-town propane salesman and his beer-drinking buddies would attract mostly urban intellectuals, with their highly developed sense of irony. In fact, as Governor Easley long ago realized, the show's primary viewer looks a lot like Hank Hill. According to Nielsen Media Research, the largest group of ''King of the Hill'' viewers is made up of men between the ages of 18 and 49, and almost a quarter of those men own pickup trucks. ''This is only the second show that's a comedy about the South -- this and 'Andy Griffith' -- that doesn't make fun of Southerners,'' Easley told me recently, adding that Hank and his neighbors remind him of the people he grew up with in the hills near Greenville. (Which is probably why Easley does startlingly good impressions of the various characters, including the verbally challenged Boomhauer.)
Easley polls surprisingly well for a Democrat among these voters, and he says he thinks that understanding the show's viewers might resolve some of the mysteries confronting his party about the vast swaths of red on the electoral map. Easley is reasonably progressive -- he raised taxes during his first term to protect education spending -- but he's also known as a guy who cracked up a race car during a spin on a Nascar course. When the governor, a former prosecutor, prepares to make his case on a partisan issue, he likes to imagine that he's explaining his position to Hank -- an exercise that might be useful for his colleagues in Washington too. For instance, Easley told me that Hank would never support a budget like the one North Carolina's Senate recently passed, which would drop some 65,000 mostly elderly citizens from the Medicaid rolls; Hank, after all, has pitched in to support his own father, a brutish war veteran, and he would never condone a community's walking away from its ailing parents. Similarly, Hank may be a lover of the environment -- he was furious when kids trashed the local campground -- but he resents self-righteous environmentalists like the ones who forced Arlen to install those annoying low-flow toilets. Voters like Hank, if they had heard about it on the evening news, would have supported Easley's ''Clean Smokestacks'' law, which forced North Carolina's coal-powered electric plants to burn cleaner, but only because industry was a partner in the final bill, rather than its target.
If other Democrats want to learn from ''King of the Hill,'' they may need to act fast. John Altschuler, one of the show's executive producers, fears that the show's 10th season next year could be its last; despite decent ratings, Fox has been buying fewer episodes and shifting its time slot, and there are rumors that the network may want to substitute yet another new reality show in its place. This is odd: after all, there is more reality about American life in five minutes of ''King of the Hill'' than in a full season of watching Paris Hilton prance around a farm in high heels. But none of this would come as much of a surprise to Hank Hill and his neighbors, who realized long ago that, as a nation, we often discard the things we once cherished in favor of a more synthetic modernity. ''The only place you can find a Main Street these days is in Disneyland,'' Hank once said. ''And just try to buy a gun there.''
Matt Bai, a contributing writer for the magazine, is writing a book about the future of the Democrats.
Correction: June 26, 2005, Sunday:
An essay in The Times Magazine today about the animated television series "King of the Hill," and what politicians, especially Democrats, could learn from it, misidentifies the hometown of Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina, an ardent fan. He grew up in Rocky Mount, not in the hills near Greenville.
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Date: 2005-06-29 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 04:15 pm (UTC)