Peace, music, and notebooks

Gimme an M. Gimme an O. Et cetera.

My daughter Rachel gave me a Woodstock Moleskine notebook.

Thank you, Rachel!

Love, Dad

[Image borrowed from Moleskine. It’s too rainy to take a nice photograph outside.]

Plaid really warmer

Good to remember as it gets colder:

From Here’s to Warmth! (Sheboygan: Plaid Manufacturers Council, 1954).

Barack Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize

Remember the spin in the wake of Rio’s Olympic victory? “WORLD REJECTS OBAMA,” yelled the Drudge Report. But Norway has gone rogue. From the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s press release:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

Yes, this award seems to be as much about the forty-third president as about the forty-fourth. But if the world (or even one rogue nation) is seeing the United States in a different way now, that’s something to celebrate. Congratulations, President Obama.

“Poor Moon”

Oh well, they might test some bomb
Oh well, and scar your skin
Oh well, I don’t think they care
So I wonder when they’re going to destroy your face

Alan Wilson’s 1969 song turns out to have been prophetic. You can listen to Canned Heat perform “Poor Moon” via YouTube. The song was released on July 15, 1969, one day before the Apollo 11 launch.

For the blues fanatics among us: “Poor Moon” borrows from Garfield Akers’ “Dough Roller Blues” and Blind Willie Johnson’s “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed.”

[On October 9, 2009, NASA bombed the moon.]

George Gershwin and Brian Wilson

The big news that was rumored to be coming from Brian Wilson:

In a surprise union of two quintessentially American composers from different eras, one the 1960s mastermind of “Good Vibrations,” the other the Jazz Age creator of Rhapsody in Blue, former Beach Boy Brian Wilson has been authorized by the estate of George Gershwin to complete unfinished songs Gershwin left behind when he died in 1937.

He plans to finish and record at least two such pieces on an album of Gershwin music he hopes to release next year.

It’s no stunt: Wilson’s love of Gershwin and the Rhapsody is well known. Read all about it:

Brian Wilson to finish some George Gershwin songs (Los Angeles Times)

(Thanks, Elaine! Thanks, Rachel!)

John Ashbery not awarded Nobel Prize

Well, he’s only eighty-two.

At a poetry reading several years ago, I had a conversation with someone who reported that Ashbery has been short-listed for the Nobel several times. (I know, there’s no official short list.)

No disrespect to Herta Müller, of whose work I know nothing.

“The circus tent is open”

Wikipedia has a fine array of euphemisms from around the world with which to speak of an open fly. Are they all real? I hope so.

The benefits of quitting

A timeline of the benefits of quitting:

When Smokers Quit (American Cancer Society)

Today for me marks twenty years minus cigarettes. Yes, I’m still proud of myself.

A related post
Nineteen years later

ClickToFlash

John Gruber of Daring Fireball explains:

ClickToFlash is an open source web content plugin for Mac OS X that blocks all Flash content on web pages by default. As the name implies, if you do want to load a Flash element, just click it. I give ClickToFlash my highest recommendation — everyone should install it.

ClickToFlash does for Safari what the Flashblock extension does for Firefox, making webpages less distracting and helping your computer to run at lower temperatures. ClickToFlash is free for Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard.

ClickToFlash (“your web browsing prophylactic”)

[Of the last 500 visitors to Orange Crate Art, 133 — 26.6% — are using OS X.]

A headstone for James P. Johnson

Duke Ellington on pianist and composer James P. Johnson (1894–1955):

James, for me, was more than the beginning. He went right on up to the top. . . .

James he was to his friends — just James, not Jimmy, nor James P. There never was another.

Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 94–95.

The James P. Johnson Foundation is raising funds to buy a headstone for Johnson’s unmarked Queens grave. Twelve pianists just performed in Manhattan for the cause.

Here, from the YouTube vaults, are two James P. Johnson performances: a 1921 QRS piano roll of his “Carolina Shout” and a 1944 Blue Note recording of “After You’ve Gone” (Turner Layton–Henry Creamer) by James P. Johnson’s Blue Note Jazzmen: Sidney DeParis (trumpet), Vic Dickenson (trombone), Ben Webster (tenor saxophone), Johnson (piano), Jimmy Shirley (guitar), John Simmons (bass), Sidney Catlett (drums). I first heard this “After You’ve Gone” as a reel-to-reel transfer, twenty-five or more years ago, at Bill Youngren’s house, with the volume turned to eleven. It was, and is, glorious.

[Personnel listing via the Blue Note Records Discography: 1939–1944.]