Procrastination

Slate has a feature today on procrastination: Just Don't Do It. I like what Emily Yoffe's twelve-year-old daughter tells her mom about procrastination:

"Mom, you sit down to go to work, then you go to the bathroom, then you walk Sasha, then you say you're checking one last e-mail. You take a lot of breaks, Mom. You say you don't get any work done after I get home from school, but I'm 12, and I don't bother you anymore. Then you'll have so much work, you work 15 hours a day and you don't even come down to dinner. You've got to balance it out."

Kid's smart.

In my battle with procrastination, I've found two strategies especially helpful: working with breaks and reminding myself of how grateful my future self will be when x (whatever x might equal) is done.

A telex from Aldo

In 1984 and 1985, my friend Aldo Carrasco worked for a textile importer in New York. He was responsible for telex communication with European companies. He also used the telex machine to send messages to Elaine at work in Boston (she was friends with the telex operator) and to the two of us at home (by mail) in Brookline, Massachusetts. Above, one such message. If you look closely, you'll see that Frankie was fumbling a bit with the lyric.

A cousin of Aldo's recently asked me if I could post something from Aldo's correspondence. This telex — spontaneous, over the top, meant to delight — reminds me of how dedicated Aldo was to making the countless kind and funny gestures that sustain friendships. I can't imagine that he ever thought twice about whether to send a letter or make a call. (His phone bills were enormous.) That's what I would call the Aldine approach to friendship: do it, say it, write it. Your friends will thank you for it.

Related post
Letters from Aldo

Happy Mother's Day

The Cartoon Bank would like to charge me $450 to reproduce this New Yorker cartoon. So please click instead.

[I've had mixed luck with Cartoon Bank URLs. If you find a cartoon unrelated to mother, you'll know that the link has expired.]

Mona Hinton (1919–2008)

My dad gave me the news on the telephone. From the Milt Hinton website:

Edmonia — Mona — Clayton Hinton, the widow of noted jazz musician and documentarian Milt Hinton (1910-2000), died on May 3, 2008, at North Shore Hospital after a long illness. She was living at the Hinton family residence on Milt Hinton Place in the Queens section of New York City.

The Hintons first met at Milt's grandmother's funeral in 1939 and were inseparable for the next 61 years. Mona traveled extensively with Milt throughout his career. She was the only spouse on the road with the Cab Calloway Orchestra in the 1940s, where, according to Milt, she was extremely helpful in finding rooms and meals for band members especially when the band worked in small towns during the Jim Crow era. During the '50s and '60s when Milt was working day and night in the New York studios, Mona kept the books and made often complicated transportation arrangements. And during the last two decades of his life, Milt and Mona got to travel to jazz festivals and clinics around the world — first class.

Elaine and I (and our very young daughter Rachel) met Milt and Mona in 1988 and 1989 at a then-yearly jazz festival in Decatur, Illinois. Mona sent Rachel (and later, Ben) a number of postcards from the road. She was, to our kids, Mrs. Hinton. We are lucky to have known her.



Mona Hinton, 1919–2008 (milthinton.com)

Hillary Clinton as Norma Desmond

[AP photo.]

She's still big (it's the primaries that got small) and, it seems, incapable of acknowledging reality.

Joe Gillis on Norma Desmond's final scene: "The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her." And Norma Desmond in her final scene: "You see, this is my life. It always will be. There's nothing else."

Dialogue from Sunset Boulevard (1950, dir. Billy Wilder), screenplay by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and D.M. Marshman, Jr.

A visit to the Eagle Pencil Company (1953)

After receiving a letter signed in pencil from Abraham H. Berwald, the Eagle Pencil Company's director of marketing, someone at the New Yorker wondered whether Eagle's people did all their writing in pencil. A visit to Eagle and an audience with Mr. Berwald followed. From "Flexibility," an unsigned New Yorker item (June 27, 1953):

"Do you know about the difficulties inherent in the manufacture of colored pencils?" he asked challengingly. We confessed ignorance. "Well, sir, the old-fashioned colored leads are terribly brittle," he said. "The thick ones broke right and left. The thin ones were even worse. But look at what we have now!" He seized a handful of carmine leads, unencased in protective wood, from his desk. "In bygone years, if I had dropped one of these on the floor, it would have smashed into six or seven pieces," he said. He dropped one on the floor, and it remained intact. "If I'd slammed it on the floor, it would have smashed into I don't know how many pieces," he continued. He wound up and slammed one on the floor, and it remained intact. Flushed with victory, he called to his secretary for a bunch of old-fashioned leads. She fetched them at once, and he began dropping and slamming them all over the room. We ducked as lead flew about us. "There!" cried Mr. Berwald. "What's happened is that we have made colored leads flexible. Why, look how far I can bend this one without break — Oops! Well, after all, there are limits."

"We ducked as lead flew about us": what a great sentence. Could it be the work of William Shawn? Ved Mehta's memoir of Shawn recounts jars of pencils on his desk and a mechanical pencil always on his person. Shawn wrote many unsigned "Talk of the Town" pieces, and I can imagine him braving an elevator ride to meet Mr. Berwald (in a tenth-floor office, as this piece notes).

The visit ended with a demonstration of the needle point of the Eagle Turquoise, so sharp that Mr. Berwald used it to play a 78 rpm record. The answer to the question that prompted the visit to Eagle: no, only a few old-timers kept to pencils. The Eagle Pencil Company was perhaps best known for Mikado (later Mirado), Turquoise, and Verithin pencils.

[Update, May 12, 2008: As Emily Gordon at Emdashes notes, "Flexibility" is by E.J. Kahn, Jr. Had I thought to look, I could have found that info online.]



[An Eagle Turquoise of my acquaintance, dating from the 1940s perhaps.]

Political metaphor of the day

From a Washington Post report on a Hillary Clinton appearance in Shepherdstown, West Virginia:

In the back of the crowd, a camera riser collapsed with a huge crash, sending bodies, coffee and cameras flying. "Metaphor?" a reporter asked as he picked himself off the ground? "Metaphor," confirmed another.

All Orange Crate Art metaphor posts (via Pinboard)

Art Tatum, God Is in the House

Art Tatum, God Is in the House (HighNote Records, 1998)

Georgia On My Mind (Carmichael - Gorrell) 2:17
Beautiful Love (Van Alstyne - Gillespie - King - Young) 1:42
Laughing at Life (C. Kenny - C. Todd - B. Todd - N. Kenny) 1:03
Sweet Lorraine (Burwell - Parish) 3:03
Fine and Dandy (Swift - James) 4:07
Begin the Beguine (Porter) 3:53
Mighty Lak a Rose (Nevin) 3:35
Knockin' Myself Out (Green) 4:03
Toledo Blues (Tatum) 3:33
Body and Soul (Heyman - Green - Sour) 3:31
There'll Be Some Changes Made (Blackstone - Overstreet) 3:28
Lady Be Good (G. Gershwin - I. Gershwin) 4:30
Sweet Georgia Brown (Pinkard - Casey - Bernie) 7:18

Art Tatum (piano and vocal), with occasional support from Reuben Harris (whiskbrooms), Frankie Newton (trumpet), Ebenezer Paul (bass), Ollie Potter (vocal), and Chocolate Williams (bass and vocal)

Fats Waller, upon seeing Art Tatum enter the joint: "Ladies and gentlemen, I play piano, but God is in the house tonight."

I've been listening to this music for years — as an LP borrowed from the Hackensack Public Library, as a cassette made from that LP, as a CD — and it continues to delight me. God Is in the House is a gathering of 1940–1941 performances recorded by Jerry Newman, a Columbia University student whose portable recording equipment has given us a priceless supplement to Tatum's studio recordings. Cutting discs in his apartment and in Harlem after-hours clubs, Newman caught Tatum in congenial circumstances, in performances that are endlessly inventive and remarkably relaxed, with appreciative laughter in the background now and then.

Tatum is for me an enigma. The one biography that I've read let me understand that he liked beer and cards. The few minutes of filmed performances show a musician who seems to execute the impossible without strain or even evidence of engagement. Tatum's version of Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays," for instance, became a set piece whose details might vary only slightly, if at all, from one performance to another.

But in the informal performances collected in God Is in the House, Tatum is inspired. On "Beautiful Love," for instance, a rubato statement of the melody is followed by a chorus that begins with an exhilarating lift, as if Tatum has decided to pick up this tune and make it swing. Here and elsewhere, the idiosyncratic resonance of an out-of-tune piano adds a strange beauty to the sound (and somehow makes it easier to recognize Tatum's influence on Thelonious Monk).

The most unexpected performances here are two vocals, "Knockin' Myself Out," with Tatum and bassist Chocolate Williams singing, and "Toledo Blues," with Tatum accompanying himself. "Knockin' Myself Out" is a tribute to reefer and its local supplier:

If you want to get high, get high kind of quick,
just fall on up to the Gee-Haw [nightspot]
and pick up on old Frank Martin's sticks

Williams sounds as if he is indeed "knockin' hisself out, gradually by degrees." On "Toledo Blues," Tatum acquits himself as a plausible blues singer, sounding like an older, tired version of Leroy Carr.

The most exciting music here comes in two performances by Tatum, trumpeter Frankie Newton, and bassist Ebenezer Paul: "Lady Be Good" and "Sweet Georgia Brown." Tatum's ability to play well with others often seems suspect: on the small group recordings he made for Verve in the 1950s, for instance, his accompaniments for soloists sound like Tatum solos with the recording level turned down. Here though he's fully engaged with his fellow musicians. On "Lady Be Good" he sounds like the Benny Goodman quartet riffing behind Newton. And on "Sweet Georgia Brown," he and Newton inspire and imitate one another in one of the most exciting musical performances ever recorded — by Newton, by Tatum, by anyone.

Operators are standing by: God Is in the House (Amazon)

All Orange Crate Art jazz posts (via Pinboard)

"Working, hard-working Americans"

Last night on PBS, a discussion of the media, the primaries, and the words used to describe black and white voters. And this morning, Hillary Clinton speaks of her broad appeal to "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans."

Can she go any lower? Yes, she can.

Related post
Yes, they can

Keith Woods on media and race

Keith Woods, Dean of Faculty at The Poynter Institute, in a PBS NewsHour discussion of how race has figured in media coverage of the current primaries:

You know, when you look at a lot of the reporting coming out of the primaries in the Democratic race, and you see the number of times that we break things down by racial categories in determining how people voted, we are in some ways abetting what I would regard as a fairly narrow and superficial discussion about race. And I think particularly when you look at the way that we have talked about the demographic groups, the degrees to which we have divided up particularly black and white America in the conversation, we reveal, I think, in some ways both the media's limitations in how it talks about it and the country's.

So you see a full vocabulary for talking about white Americans in this debate, from "bluecollar" — a euphemism for white bluecollar workers. We talk about "lunchbucket Democrats"; we talk about "the soccer mom" and "the NASCAR dad," all of which are euphemisms in the national discourse for white Americans. And then we talk about "black people," as though they are all the same, with pretty much all the same views. And Latinos and Asians haven't fared much better. And we don't talk at all about Native Americans.

Listen to the rest as an MP3:

Media and Race (Online NewsHour, 5.2 MB download)