Roger Ebert, telling it like it is (Ebert clarifies his meaning in a coda)
Old and unimproved (on life online)
Thursday, September 2, 2010
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Changing the language of business
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Roger Ebert, telling it like it is
Rogert Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times:
Our political immune system has only one antibody, and that is the truth.Update, September 2, 2010: Ebert has appended a brief coda, to leave no question about his meaning:
The time is here for responsible Americans to put up or shut up. I refer specifically to those who have credibility among the guileless and credulous citizens who have been infected with notions so carefully nurtured. We cannot afford to allow the next election to proceed under a cloud of falsehood and delusion.
We know, because they’ve said so publicly, that George W. Bush, his father and Sen. John McCain do not believe Obama is a Muslim. This is the time — now, not later — for them to repeat that belief in a joint statement. Other prominent Republicans such as Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul also certainly do not believe it. They have a responsibility to make that clear by subscribing to the statement. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh must join, or let their silence indict them. Limbaugh in particular must cease his innuendos and say, flat out, whether he believes the President is a Muslim or not. Yes or no. Does he have evidence, or does he have none? Yes or no.
To do anything less at this troubled time in our history would be a crime against America.
Many readers have made the same point: What if Obama were a Muslim? What would be wrong with that? There would be nothing wrong. There is no religious test in this nation for holders of office. This is not a “Christian nation,” although you often hear that, because of what is specified in the Constitution. America was founded by refugees from religious persecution, and the Founding Fathers deliberately wrote in safeguards to prevent an Established Religion.Related posts
Barack Obama on facts
Timothy Egan and Leonard Pitts, Jr. on American ignorance
The Lonely Phone Booth
The Lonely Phone Booth is a book by Peter Ackerman, with illustrations by Max Dalton (Boston: David R. Godine, 2010). The Phone Booth (yes, a proper name) stands at the corner of West End Avenue and 100th Street. It is one of the last outdoor phone booths in Manhattan. From Peter Ackerman’s website:
Kept clean and polished, the Phone Booth was proud and happy . . . until, the day a businessman strode by and shouted into a shiny silver object, “I’ll be there in ten minutes!” Soon everyone was talking into these shiny silver things, and the Phone Booth stood alone and empty, unused and dejected.The intended audience is four- to eight-year-olds, preternaturally wistful four- to eight-year-olds perhaps. In truth, I think the intended audience is me.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Review: Brian Wilson
Reimagines Gershwin
Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin (Disney Pearl Series, 2010)
Rhapsody In Blue / Intro : The Like In I Love You : Medley: Summertime / I Loves You Porgy / I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’ / It Ain’t Necessarily So : ’S Wonderful : They Can’t Take That Away From Me : Love Is Here To Stay : I’ve Got A Crush On You : I Got Rhythm : Someone To Watch Over Me : Nothing But Love : Rhapsody In Blue / Reprise
Playing time 39:11
The Great American Songbook is in need of all the reinterpretation it can get: one tires of the earnest, closely-miked voices and soft — no, softer — no, even softer — accompanists of the cabaret world. Brian Wilson has reinterpreted the music of George Gershwin with energy, wit, and moments of considerable beauty. He is in fine voice on this recording and, it would seem, fine spirits.
The most-hyped performances here seem to me the weakest. The two fragments of Rhapsody in Blue, for Wilson’s stacked vocals and strings, feel oddly truncated — not even all of the Rhapsody’s most familiar theme is here. On Orange Crate Art, stacked Wilsons sounded loopily beautiful. Here, they sound like someone singing in a hall of mirrors. The effect is unnerving.
The two Gershwin–Wilson collaborations (written with Scott Bennett) are a mixed bag. “The Like in I Love You” has a good melody, but its lyrics (by Wilson and Bennett) disappoint. A sample (my transcription):
Gliding in a starless sky,On “Nothing But Love,” which seems to me a slighter song, Wilson’s voice is swamped by an overly busy arrangement.
’Til we found the inner light,
Now we can duplicate the universe.
Overly busy arrangements seem to have been the order of the day in making this album. “Summertime” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So” are particularly heavy-handed, though they’re partly redeemed by the bits of incidental music that join them to the middle sections of a Porgy and Bess medley. Much more successful: “I Got Plenty of Nuttin’,” transformed into a Pet Sounds-era instrumental, with bass harmonica and timpani, and “’S Wonderful,” which evokes Frank Sinatra’s bossa nova recordings with Antonio Carlos Jobim and Wilson’s own “Busy Doin’ Nothin’.” Two more highlights: “I Got Rhythm,” reimagined in the spirit of “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and “Someone to Watch Over Me,” which becomes a second Pet Sounds outtake, with harpischord, percussion, and electric bass suggesting the textures of “Caroline, No.”
The best performance on this album is, for me, wholly unexpected: “I Loves You Porgy.” The arrangement is appropriately understated, and Wilson’s singing is engaged and genuinely affecting, with no trace of self-consciousness. When I think of the grief that, say, Mike Love might have given “cousin Brian” over this song (“Hey, guys, Brian’s ‘got his man’”), I hear in this performance a quiet triumph of grown-upness.
A note on the CD package: as with That Lucky Old Sun, Brian Wilson’s musical collaborators are rendered almost anonymous, unphotographed and identified in the tiniest of credits. (There are no photographs of George or Ira Gershwin either, only of Brian Wilson.) David Wild’s liner notes are a string of inanities and platitudes. For instance: “all of the most inspiring music is timeless.” Maybe Wild really is in a position to know that. But it’s difficult to take seriously a writer whose notes refer to the “the Gershwin cannon.”
And speaking of cannons, or canons, there is no explanation here of what Gershwin material Wilson and Bennett have worked with. More helpful, but not much more so: a press release at Brian Wilson’s website describes “The Like in I Love You” as “drawn from” “Will You Remember Me?,” an unused song written for Lady, Be Good! (1924). (What the website doesn’t say is that the song has been recorded at least twice, by Michael Feinstein and Susannah McCorkle. McCorkle’s version, a verse and one chorus, is beautiful.) The press release describes “Nothing But Love” as “based on” “Say My Say,” an unfinished song from 1929. If there were a margin, therein I would write, “Explain?”
A related post
Review: That Lucky Old Sun
Monday, August 30, 2010
The OED, in and out of print
The OED may become an online-only resouce:
Publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary have confirmed that the third edition may never appear in print. . . . In comments to a Sunday newspaper, Nigel Portwood, chief executive of Oxford University Press, which owns the dictionary, said: “The print dictionary market is just disappearing. It is falling away by tens of percent a year.” Asked if he thought the third edition would appear in printed format, he said: “I don't think so.”
Third edition of OED unlikely to appear in print format (Guardian)
Designing Obama
Scott Thomas, Design Director of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, has put together a book, Designing Obama. It’s also available as a free (free!) PDF.
A funny excerpt from Michael Bierut’s essay “The Rest Is Easy”:
Like every other graphic designer I know, I watched the live images of campaign rallies from Toledo to Topeka with a growing feeling of awe. Obama’s oratorical skills were one thing. But the awe-inspiring part was the way all the signs were faithfully, and beautifully, set in Hoefler & Frere-Jones’s typeface Gotham.A related post
Campaign typography
Saturday, August 28, 2010
The new Blackwing pencil
[Blackwings: a new Palomino and an old Eberhard Faber. Click for a much larger view.]
[Note: The “pre-production” Blackwing, it turns out, is the new Blackwing. See below for an explanation.]
While waiting for two pre-production Blackwing pencils to arrive in the mail, I began thinking about an old song: “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.” Sentimental reasons are reason enough to like the Blackwing: the sheer dowdiness of the design, the roster of distinguished users — Archibald MacLeish, Nelson Riddle, Stephen Sondheim, and John Steinbeck among them. Somewhere — where? — I’ve seen a photograph of Duke Ellington with Blackwing in hand. The Blackwing even boasts a slogan — “Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed” — as if this pencil were a personal brand, like a cigarette. Sentiment aside, the Blackwing is a pencil whose smooth lead makes writing a simple pleasure. I’d walk a mile for a Blackwing.
California Cedar Products’ choice to revive the Blackwing cannot be explained by profit motive alone. It’s a labor of love, evident most obviously in the recreation of the Blackwing’s distinctive ferrule. (The breakage of expensive-to-repair ferrule-making machinery helped bring production of the original Blackwing to an end.) The care that has gone into the new Blackwing’s manufacture is considerable: I immediately noticed that each pencil’s ferrule and imprint are in alignment, so that the Blackwing name is visible when the pencil lies flat (that’s not the case with every old Blackwing). My new sample Blackwings are not perfect: one has minute specks of gold paint on the barrel; the other has thin black streaks across the imprint. (The streaks are visible in the photograph above.) As Henry Petroski notes in The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1992), few pencils, if any, turn out to be perfect when subject to close inspection.
[The new Blackwing makes a noticeably darker line, no?]
Writing with the new Blackwing is a pleasure. The lead is soft and smooth and doesn’t smear, though now and then a tiny crumb breaks off. The new Blackwing’s point wears more quickly than that of the old Blackwing, and the new pencil’s line is noticeably darker. (An older California Cedar HB Palomino pencil in my possession is, to my surprise, darker and softer still.) The new Blackwing’s eraser works well but not perfectly, leaving a slight trace of lead on a yellow legal pad and a slight sheen on a Moleskine calendar page. But this eraser doesn’t destroy paper, as the erasers on my old Blackwings do, and did, even when new.
[Old imprint.]
[New imprint.]
The differences in appearance between the old and new Blackwings are many, and likely — for sentimental reasons — to be significant to the dedicated user. The brand name appears in larger and more eccentric lettering on the old Blackwing (note especially the C, K and G). The imprint on the new Blackwing is not nearly as crisp, though the lettering does have the advantage of being readable in any light. The Blackwing slogan is missing from the new pencil: perhaps the cost of printing on two sides of the barrel is prohibitive. Most important though, I think, is the change in color. The old Blackwing has been described as charcoal-grey or smoke-grey, but I prefer to think of it as graphite-grey: the Blackwing has the shiny grey look of pencil lead itself. The black, gold, and white design of the new Blackwing is not nearly as attractive. To my eyes, it suggests a now-dated idea of luxury, reminiscent of hair-tonic bottles and whitewall tires. Yipes.
My suggestion to California Cedar: the visual appeal of this pencil is likely to be as important to potential customers as the quality of the lead. Witness the speculation that just brewed about whether the Blackwing slogan would appear on the barrel. Change the color of the barrel to graphite-grey, drop the gold band, and enlarge the Blackwing imprint. Stamp the Blackwing slogan on each pencil if that can be done at a reasonable cost. A pink — or grey? or black? — eraser would be a significant improvement. Appearances aside though, the new Blackwing offers a writing experience that will be a pleasure in any color scheme.
[I refer in this post to “the old” and “the new” Blackwing, but I am, of course, evaluating tokens, not types.]
[All photographs by Michael Leddy.]
September 13, 2010: Production Blackwings are now en route to the States from Japan. It’s not clear whether they differ in any respect from the pre-production samples.
September 15, 2010: California Cedar has been, I think, misleading — at best — in describing these pencils as “pre-production” samples. I evaluated the new Blackwing with the understanding that my comments (and those of other Blackwing fanciers) would help to shape the finished pencil. The very short turnaround time between the distribution of samples and the shipping of finished pencils to the States now makes clear that changes in design based on users’ evaluations were never in the offing. The “pre-production” Blackwing, it turns out, is the new Blackwing. So why send out “pre-production” pencils? You can read Cal Cedar’s explanation here. There’s more discussion (and a bit of subterfuge) in the comments on this post.
I for one won’t be buying — not because of the new Blackwing’s design but because of what I consider to have been a misleading marketing effort.
Other Blackwing posts
All Blackwing posts (Pinboard)
Duke Ellington, Blackwing pencils, and aspirational branding
The Palomino Blackwing pencil and truth in advertising
Palomino Blackwing non-users
Nelson Riddle on the Blackwing pencil
Stephen Sondheim on pencils, paper
John Steinbeck on the Blackwing pencil
Other reviews
Blackwing, Reborn. (The Blackwing Pages)
Mark Frauenfelder, First impression of the new Blackwing pencil (Boing Boing)
Palomino Blackwing pencil (Pencil Talk)
Wiedergeburt eines Klassikers [Rebirth of a Classic] (Lexikaliker)
August 28, 1963
[“Leaders of March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom marching w. signs (R-L): Matthew Ahmann, Floyd McKissick, Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Eugene Carson Blake and unident.” August 28, 1963. Photograph by Robert W. Kelley. Via the Life photo archive. Click for a larger view.]
Audio, text, and video of King’s “I Have a Dream,” speech (American Rhetoric)
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