A new album from Brian Wilson

In the news:

Brian Wilson will release his first album in more than three years in September, a project that marks his return to Capitol Records, the label where he gained fame with the Beach Boys during the 1960s.

That Lucky Old Sun will come out in the United States on September 2, and a day earlier internationally, Wilson and Capitol announced on Monday during a news conference at the label's historic tower in Hollywood.

"It's a great honor to be here and a very sentimental time in my life," said Wilson, 65, looking relatively healthy in a striped polo shirt, faded jeans and slip-on tennis shoes. "I haven't recorded here in 46 years, almost half a century that I haven't recorded here. Ha!"

That Lucky Old Sun is a collaboration with Scott Bennett (of Wilson's band) and Van Dyke Parks.

Five radios

1
I remember my first transistor radio, a Zenith with a leather case and an earphone that looked like a hearing aid. I think that I received this radio as a present for First Communion (halfhearted Catholic childhood). My most vivid memory of this radio involves summer and a "beach chair" (lawn chair) on which I sat in front of my grandparents' house, one leg elevated, listening to WABC and WMCA (the Beatles, the Four Seasons' "Rag Doll"). I had bruised my leg very badly trying to jump up the steep steps of my stoop, two steps at a time.

2
I remember my parents' FM radio, which sat on their bedroom dresser. This radio took several minutes to warm up, and I liked seeing the red-orange warmth as the tubes came to life. In early adolescence, I listened to hours of blues from the twenties and thirties on this radio, via Columbia University's WKCR. Yes, those were my Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

[ ]
I don't remember a second transistor radio, but I must have had one, because I do remember listening to Jean Shepherd on WOR when I was in high school. I listened in bed with an earphone and never fell asleep.

3
I remember the kitchen radio, AM-FM, always tuned to WOR in the morning ("Rambling with Gambling") or to news station WINS ("You give us 22 minutes; we'll give you the world").

4, 5
I remember the AM radios in the family station wagon (a Ford Torino) and my first car (a Honda Civic 1200). As a college commuter in those cars, I listened to Gambling in the morning (with helicopter reports on traffic) and Bob and Ray in the afternoon. Being stuck in traffic on the approach to the George Washington Bridge was a lot more bearable with Bob and Ray, Mary and Harry Backstayge, and Wally Ballou ("-ly Ballou here").

[Reading about WKCR in the New Yorker prompted me to write this post. My model is Joe Brainard's I Remember, a book with a simple and brilliant premise.]

[Update, May 29, 2008: I just found a photograph of the Zenith on Flickr: Zenith Royal 12.]

Yahoo! Mail memorial tagline

Goodbye, taglines. I will have to be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all without you.

"Your world is doomed!"

From a New Yorker profile of WKCR-FM's Phil Schaap:

The precocious obsessive is a familiar high-school type, particularly among boys, but the object of Schaap's obsession was a peculiar one among his classmates. "The lonely days were adolescence," he admitted. "My peer group thought I was out of my mind. But, even then, kids knew basic things about jazz. Teddy Goldstein knew 'Take the A Train.' But he kept telling me, 'Don't you know what the Beatles are doing? Your world is doomed!'"

Creative counting

From CNN:

Clinton has recently been claiming a lead over Obama in the popular vote, a debatable claim, especially because the Democratic National Committee doesn't count the votes of Florida and Michigan, which Clinton does. . . . Clinton's campaign also excludes the caucus states in their popular vote count.

Too bad the Clinton approach wasn't available when I was an undergrad. I could've used it to improve my GPA:

1. Exclude any history course from the spring semester of freshman year.

2. Exclude all courses in biology, mathematics, and physics.

3. 4.0!

Looking at Lincoln

Visiting the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum yesterday, I wasn't wowed by the lifelike figures standing about (John Wilkes Booth outside the White House!). I wasn't wowed by the sound effects (e.g., snoring in the Lincoln cabin) or the Ivesian blur of choral music, orchestral music, and (live) guitar and dulcimer. The Scholarship meets Showmanship™ philosophy of the so-called "Experience Museum" leaves me cold. The experience I want in a museum is that of being able to look at things without distraction. Dowdy me.

What I best liked in the museum: Looking at the back inside cover of one of Lincoln's law books, filled with pencil jottings. Looking at a sequence of photographs that show how Lincoln aged through the Civil War. And in a temporary exhibit about presidential campaigns, looking at a television camera used in a 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate. It was a CBS camera, surprisingly small, with a broken plastic 2 on its front. I wonder if it might be the camera on the right in this photograph (no. 1 is on the left).

And check your spelling

Seen on a daytrip yesterday, the two faces of a church signboard:

 LIVE YOUR LIFE AS IF SOMEONE
IS WRITING A BOOK ABOUT YOU

    AUTOGRAPH YOUR WORK
         WITH EXCELLANCE

Classic Arts Showcase

From the website:

Launched in 1994, Classic Arts Showcase is a free cable television program designed to bring the classic arts experience to the largest audience possible by providing video clips of the arts in hopes that we may tempt you, the viewer, to go out and feast from the buffet of arts available in your community. The spectrum of classic arts disciplines aired on Classic Arts Showcase includes video samplings of animation, architectural art, ballet, chamber and choral music, dance, folk art, museum art, musical theater, opera, orchestral, recital, solo instrumental. solo vocal, and theatrical performances, as well as classic film and archival documentaries.

Classic Arts Showcase is available at no cost to any cable provider willing to provide a channel. If you're lucky to live in a community in which CAS is available, you know what a wonderful service it is. If it's not available, a small number of people might be able to persuade a local provider. Here in "downstate Illinois," Elaine and I switched cable providers when one company dropped the service and another picked it up. (Take that, Mediacom.)

What I like best about Classic Arts Showcase is the chance to see and hear performers who are new to me. YouTube is great, but Classic Arts Showcase introduces me to people I wouldn't know to look for — Ruth Etting and Josef Schmidt, for instance.

Classic Arts Showcase is the work of businessman and philanthropist Lloyd Rigler (1915–2003), who with his business partner Lawrence Deutsch (1920–1977) did all sorts of good for the cause of culture.

[If you're looking for the names of the pieces played during CAS station breaks, they're here: Classic Arts Showcase background music.]

Phishing

[Click for larger version.]

Yahoo's spam filters are letting just a few of these e-mails through. I hope that human readers are not as easily fooled. This pitch strongly resembles one that I received last month. Two new details that amuse me here: "either one" (of three!) and "We demand." And "Internet Banking Holder," whatever it might mean, is a phrase that it seems only phishers use.

I'm not easily fooled, but I'm easily entertained.

"In the Basement of the Ivory Tower"

From the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic, an essay by Professor X:

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it — try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

I am the man who has to lower the hammer.

This essay is required reading for anyone thinking about American education. And it's available online:

"In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" (The Atlantic)