Beyond category

Duke Ellington always insisted that great art is "beyond category." Here he is, refusing to be categorized by an interviewer:

You've been quoted as saying that you write the music of your people as it sounds to you.

Mm-hmm.

Now, would you like to expound on that a little bit?

Let's see. My people--now which of my people? I mean--you know, I'm in several groups, you know. I'm in--let's see--I'm in the group of the piano players. I'm in the group of the listeners. I'm in the groups of people who have general appreciation of music. I'm in the group of those who aspire to be dilettantes. I'm in the group of those who attempt to produce something fit for the plateau. I'm in the group of--what now? Oh, yeah, those who appreciate Beaujolais [laughs]. And then of course I'm in the--of course, I've had such a strong influence by the music of the people. The people, that's the better word, the people rather than my people, because the people are my people.

[Transcribed from Ken Burns' Jazz. The film footage looks to be from the mid-1960s.]

Fanny Ellison (1911-2005)

From this morning's New York Times:

Fanny McConnell Ellison, who was involved in the theater, politics and civil rights before she married Ralph Ellison and helped him edit his masterpiece, "Invisible Man," died on Nov. 19 at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan. She was 93.

The cause was complications of hip surgery, said John F. Callahan, Ellison's literary executor.

The poet Langston Hughes arranged for her to meet Ellison after she said she yearned to meet a man who was interested in books. She had met Hughes while directing a production of his "Don't You Want to Be Free?" in Chicago put on by the Negro People's Theater, which she had founded.

In June 1944, Ellison, then a merchant seaman, and his future wife met at Frank's restaurant on 125th Street in Harlem; both ordered the cheapest item on the menu, and talked until the place closed. They were married from August 1946 until Ellison's death at 80 in April 1994.

LINK: "Fanny Ellison, 93, Dies; Helped Husband Edit 'Invisible Man'" (from the New York Times)

{To read the Times online without a free account of your own, visit BugMeNot.]

What you can't buy at Wal-Mart

I read a letter to the editor this morning stating that Wal-Mart has "basically anything you could ever imagine and need." Sigh.

The writer was encouraging his readers to buy from locally-owned businesses, a position I fully support. Still, I'm bothered by the assumption that Wal-Mart is the answer to all our material needs, that Wal-Mart somehow contains within it everything we might ever want. Isn't that exactly what Wal-Mart wants its customers to believe?

Here are five items I can't buy at Wal-Mart:

bottled ink (I write with a fountain pen)
flat (Italian) parsley
loose Twinings tea
Moleskine notebooks
Patak vindaloo curry paste

These items are a random listing of what immediately comes to mind. If I were to begin thinking about matters of culture--art, books, movies, music--there'd be no end to a list of items that I can't buy at Wal-Mart. Since I choose not to shop at Wal-Mart (save for increasingly rare, extenuating-circumstance scenarios), it's all moot. I wouldn't want to buy these things at Wal-Mart anyway. Doing so would only undercut the efforts of the businesses that are already making them available to me.

What can't you buy at Wal-Mart?

Flow

Many people give up on learning after they leave school because thirteen or twenty years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories. Their attention has been manipulated long enough from the outside by textbooks and teachers, and they have counted graduation as the first day of freedom.

But a person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free. His thinking will be directed by the opinions of his neighbors, by the editorials in the papers, and by the appeals of television. He will be at the mercy of "experts." Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically. At that point the goal of studying is no longer to make the grade, earn a diploma, and find a good job. Rather, it is to understand what one's experience is all about. From that will come the profound joy of the thinker, like that experienced by the disciples of Socrates that Plato describes in Philebus: "The young man who has drunk for the first time from that spring is as happy as if he had found a treasure of wisdom; he is positively enraptured. He will pick up any discourse, draw all its ideas together to make them into one, then take them apart and pull them to pieces. He will puzzle first himself, then also others, badger whoever comes near him, young and old, sparing not even his parents, nor anyone who is willing to listen. . . ."

The quotation is about twenty-four centuries old, but a contemporary observer could not describe more vividly what happens when a person first discovers the flow of the mind.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial, 1990)

"Self-Reliance" and jazz

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

I was obsessed with the idea that this is what you had to do--something that was your own, that had nothing to do with anybody else. But I was influenced by him, not in terms of notes but in terms of the idea of doing what you are, who you are.

Artie Shaw, on listening to Louis Armstrong at the Savoy Ballroom (from Ken Burns' Jazz)

Related posts
The day Louis Armstrong made noise
Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
Louis Armstrong's advice

VINYL GAFFE, LEDDY CHARGES

Last year the New York Times published an obituary of the pianist Joe Bushkin that made reference to the tape beginning to roll at an early '30s recording session. Oops. I e-mailed the Times, and almost a month later, a correction finally appeared.

In this morning's Times, Jane and Michael Stern's review of Bob Spitz's book The Beatles includes this description of the Quarry Men recording "That'll Be the Day":

for the money they were paying, they could not record on tape. And they got one take, straight to vinyl.

Oops. The Quarry Men recorded an acetate. As the booklet for volume 1 of the Beatles' Anthology says, the five musicians passed around "a very-breakable 78rpm record."

This sort of mistake--the casual rewriting of musical history--drives my dad crazy. Me too. Time for another e-mail to the Times.

Yes, that's a fake headline above.

Noticed

On the signboard for a Bob Evans restaurant:

NEWS LOWROASTED
        MEATLOAF

I remember Thanksgiving

My family has kept up a Thanksgiving tradition for some years now, inspired by Joe Brainard's I Remember, a remarkable book of memory. I Remember consists of short paragraphs and single sentences, each beginning with the words "I remember." The form of course is Brainard's invention--seemingly simple, but accommodating an amazing range of experience and feeling. If this description doesn't sound very promising, try I Remember, and you may change your mind.

Every Thanksgiving, we sit down at some point to write and read "I remembers" and make our own homely memorial to the day. If we have a friend or friends over, he or she or they write some "I remembers" too. Our friend Norman still sends his by e-mail every Thanksgiving. (Thanks, Norman!)

When we read over "I remembers" from previous years, we're always struck by the way they bring back to us the smallest details of the day. Here are the six "I remembers" that I wrote this afternoon:

I remember being "buffeted" by the wind while taking a walk with Elaine.

I remember remembering Gertrude Stein's sentence, "Roast potatoes for."

I remember Red Nose Beaujolais.

I remember Ben's guitar-playing and thinking about what an accomplished guitarist he's become.

I remember how strange the rules for Mad Gab are, and how so many phrases in the game come from current media culture.

I remember thinking how nice it is to have everyone home at the same time, making the house "family-ly."

LINK: joebrainard.org, devoted to Joe Brainard's art and writing

LINK: I Remember (Granary Books)

Twelve ways to boost your immunity

The BBC offers twelve tips to help boost your immunity--to illness, not from prosecution. It's getting more and more wintry here in the American midwest, and I find that even thinking about boosting my immunity seems to be helpful.

LINK: "Boost your immunity" (via Deeper Motive)

Warning label

LINK: Warning label generator (via lifehack.org)