Notes From a Memoir

by Sam Bluefarb (September 2011)

The 1930s and 40s now seem as remote as the Middle Ages. . .
—Robert McCrum, The Observer, Sunday, February 21, 2010

 

Rise like Lions after slumber

Shake your chains to earth like dew

[http://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2008/10/10/the-life-cafeteria/   A painting of  Life Cafeteria  by Vimcent di Gambina. The accompanying note below it, hardly does justice to a convivial meeting place comparable to the Café Dome in Paris, though not as famous of course. Maxwell Bodenheim’s play on the word “arrest”—as in “Life [Cafeteria] was an arrestaurant”–was a cheap shot. If anyone was arrested, it was people like himself who created drunken scenes wherever they went. “Downtrodden”? “male prostitutes?”—there may have been; but this was not the legacy LIFE deserved. It was more than just “an eaterie on Sheridan Square.”

The block capitals of its neon sign above the cafeteria was a replica of the font style of LIFE magazine, which glowed pale blue against the night above Sheridan Square.

[9] Louis Filler, A`Dictionary of American Conservatism, Pref. Russell Kirk (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1988), 260

Sam Bluefarb is Prof. Emeritus, Los Angeles Harbor College.

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