Overheard

"It's not a beauty contest; it's a scholarship program."

All "overheard" posts (Pinboard)

A new Van Dyke Parks interview

From an interview series, Conversations about Creativity:

Cecil Vortex: Is there anything you've found that helps get you into a more creative mode?

Van Dyke Parks: Yes -- smoking is good. Smoking is very helpful. But it's deadly, so today is my second day without smoking. I stopped smoking on Sunday, having smoked for years.

I think that smoking is a very good thing to do -- it's got the association with the Indians; it's a peaceable thing. But like much else that the Indians gave us, we abused the privilege. And so, in my case I must simply stop. I'm too old to smoke. But I do believe that nicotine provides a great creative thrust….

Read the rest:

An Interview with Van Dyke Parks (Cecil Vortex)

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Van Dyke Parks speaks
Van Dyke Parks interviewed
Arts and science

Happy birthday, Brian Wilson

Odd coincidence: someone from Hawthorne, California (on completely unrelated business) visited Orange Crate Art today, which reminded me that it's Brian Wilson's birthday. Brian Wilson is 65 today. Above, four stills of BW performing "Surf's Up," from the 1966 television special Inside Pop, hosted by Leonard Bernstein.

You can find the partial performance from this television show on YouTube, as excerpted from a more recent documentary. The voice at the end belongs to Van Dyke Parks, who wrote the words to Brian Wilson's music.

"Surf's Up" (Brian Wilson)

"Then you'll know I'm gone"

Kitty Carlisle Hart to her piano accompanist:

"When I die and there's a memorial service, I want you to go to the piano and play 'The Man I Love' in my key. If I don't come out on that stage, then you'll know I'm gone.”

From an article on the memorial service for Miss Carlisle:

Hart Was Doyenne of the Arts and Showbiz (New York Times)

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Kitty Carlisle Hart

Overheard

In the library, courtesy of my son Ben:

"Isn't there a song about summertime?"

Yes, there is. Or are. Enjoy, via YouTube:

"All Summer Long" (Brian Wilson)
"In the Good Old Summertime" (Chet Atkins)
"In the Summertime" (Mungo Jerry)
"Summer in the City" (The Lovin' Spoonful)
"Summertime" (Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald)
"Summertime" (Bill Evans Trio)
"Summertime" (Ella Fitzgerald)
"Summertime" (Renée Fleming)
"Summertime" (Jascha Heifetz)
"Summertime" (Billie Holiday)
"Summertime" (Leontyne Price)
"Summertime" (Doc Watson)
"Summertime Blues" (Blue Cheer)
"Summertime Blues" (Eddie Cochran)
"Summertime Blues" (The Who)

I know that Eddie Cochran should precede Blue Cheer, but Alphabetical Order is a mighty thing.

All "overheard" posts (Pinboard)

Fauxstess cupcakes

[Photograph by Rachel Leddy]

A vegan recreation of childhood. Yes, "creme"-filled, and delicious (and much better than the original). The recipe may be found in Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Vegan with a Vengeance. Isa and Terry Hope Romero are the authors of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.

(Thanks, Elaine and Rachel!)

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Vegan cupcakes

Barack Obama on race

One more passage from Barack Obama:

To say that we are one people is not to suggest that race no longer matters -- that the fight for equality has been won, or that the problems that minorities face in this country today are largely self-inflicted. We know the statistics: On almost every single socioeconomic indicator, from infant mortality to life expectancy to employment to home ownership, black and Latino Americans in particular continue to lag far behind their white counterparts. In corporate boardrooms across America, minorities are grossly underrepresented; in the United States Senate, there are only three Latinos and two Asian members (both from Hawaii), and as I write today I am the chamber's sole African American. To suggest that our racial attitudes play no part in these disparities is to turn a blind eye to both our history and our experience -- and to relieve ourselves of the responsibility to make things right.

Moreover, while my own upbringing hardly typifies the African American experience -- and although, largely through luck and circumstance, I now occupy a position that insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average black man must endure -- I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my forty-five years have been directed my way: security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their car keys as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me over for no apparent reason. I know what it's like to have people tell me I can't do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger. I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilant against some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb -- from TV and music and friends and the streets -- about who the world thinks they are, and what the world imagines they should be.

To think clearly about race, then, requires us to see the world on a split screen -- to maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want while looking squarely at America as it is, to acknowledge the sins of our past and the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (NY: Crown, 2006), 232-33

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Happy Father's Day

[Photo circa 1990]

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Things my children no longer say

Bloomsday

[Ulysses (1922), opening page of the 1961 Modern Library edition]

Today is Bloomsday, the 1904 Thursday on which most of the events of James Joyce's Ulysses take place. (The novel ends in the early morning hours of June 17.)

Ulysses begins:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

—Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

The design of the Modern Library Ulysses (1934), with the first letters of the novel's three sections -- S, M, P -- filling whole pages, helped to elicit some wonderful if perhaps tenuous speculations about Joyce's art. S, M, P -- subject, middle, and predicate, the three parts of a syllogism. The letters have also been understood in terms of the novel's principal figures: S for Stephen Dedalus, the focus of Stephen Dedalus' section of the novel; M for Molly Bloom, to whom Leopold Bloom's thoughts always return; P for "Poldy," Molly's Leopold, to whom she said "yes I will Yes."

It may be no more than coincidence that the novel's first and last words reverse one another (s to y, y to s).

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123456

Browser screenshots

Browsershots and IE NetRenderer are two no-cost online services useful to anyone with a webpage. Enter a URL, and you'll get screenshots showing how the page displays in a variety of browsers, in a variety of operating systems.

Looking at Orange Crate Art with these services a couple of days ago let me see that my blog was displaying properly in every browser tested -- except for Internet Explorer (which I never, ever, use). What's more: IE 5.5, 6, and 7 each displayed the page differently. I had to tinker with the padding for a section of the sidebar to get the various IEs to cooperate.

If you have a webpage, I'd recommend trying these services. You may be surprised to see the variety of browsers available. (I like Firefox.) And if there's an unsightly problem, it's nice to know about it (as with spinach between your teeth and things of that nature).

(Which reminds me: Why are the kids today always referring to "things of that nature"? And "and whatnot"?)

Browsershots
IE NetRenderer