Betty Garrett (1919–2011)

From the Los Angeles Times obituary:

Betty Garrett, a comedic actress who was a fixture in such MGM musicals as On The Town and Take Me Out to the Ballgame, a regular on the television series All in the Family and Laverne & Shirley and a star on Broadway and in Los Angeles theater productions, has died. . . .

In a 2009 interview with The Times, Garrett reflected on her long career. “People say, how come you’ve lasted this long?” she said. “I say I think it’s because all of my life I have gotten to do what I love to do.”

Betty Garrett was the last living member of the cast of On the Town. Her Brunhilde Esterhazy is my family’s favorite cabdriver.

Borders and bankruptcy

The Wall Street Journal reports that Borders is headed for bankruptcy:

Borders Group Inc. is in the final stages of preparing a bankruptcy filing, clinching a long fall for a company with humble beginnings that helped change the way Americans buy books but failed to keep pace with the digital transformation rocking every corner of the media landscape.

The troubled Ann Arbor, Mich., bookseller could file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-protection as soon as Monday or Tuesday, paving the way for hundreds of store closings and thousands of job losses, said people familiar with the matter.

My recent visits to a local Borders have left me feeling embarrassed: fewer and fewer books worth buying, more and more trinkets, T-shirts, and empty space. (I get embarrassed in stores that are obviously struggling.) In the past thirty days, Borders has sent me twenty-two e-mails, hawking chocolate, coffee, flowers, the Kobo eReader, wine — oh, and books. It’s sad: everything the company has done to bring in more money seems to give the dedicated reader less reason to feel good about going to Borders.

Related posts
Borders Books and Music in trouble (2008)
Goodbye, Pages for All Ages

Virtual Typewriter

[Click for a larger view.]

Douglas Ewart and Stephen Goldstein

East Gallery
Krannert Art Museum
Champaign, Illinois
February 10, 2011

Douglas Ewart, alto clarinet, sopranino saxophone, didgeridoo, flutes, voice, percussion
Stephen Goldstein, digital percussion, handclaps, rainstick

Sitting down to write about this performance, I realize that I have no idea how long these musicians played last night — an hour? hour and a half? two? Someone said things ran late. All I know is that I was listening to a collaboration that was a delight to the ear, one that made time both fly and stand still, with Ewart shifting from instrument to instrument and Goldstein drawing an ever-changing variety of sounds and textures from two percussion pads (played with hands, sticks, and brushes) and an iPhone.

Like other musicians who came up in the AACM (Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), Ewart is an unassuming virtuoso, with an extraordinary command of tone and dynamics. Last night, he sustained circular breathing for longer than I would have thought possible, producing overtones, squawks, and whispers along the way. The most surprising moment though was a song, “BP They Making a New Dead Sea,” a solemn and fiercely satiric parade of long e rhymes: “BP means Bad Philosophy.”

Ewart is both musician and instrument-maker. In a pre-performance talk (whose topics ranged from the importance of water to the horror of plastic bags), he explained the importance of making, which for him began when he was a child in Jamaica, raised by a grandmother who pointed out that the toys on store shelves were likely to fall apart all too quickly. So Ewart began making things of his own. Last night he showed a group of Sonic Tops, made (in adulthood, for children) from found materials. The tops spun mightily on the gallery floor.

The most exciting moment for Elaine and me was the final piece. Ewart invited our son Ben and concert organizer Jason Finkelman to add their voices — banjo and berimbau, respectively — to the proceedings. It all makes sense, really: Ewart was a guest-in-residence for the week in Ben’s residence hall, where Ben (a Resident Assistant) spent a good chunk of time with him.

[Douglas Ewart and Ben Leddy. Photograph by Elaine Fine. Click for a larger view.]

You can see some of Douglas Ewart’s instruments and other artworks at his website. Note the Lab Coat and Crepuscular Stamping Stick in the above photograph.

Thanks to Jason Finkelman, who continues to bring the musical news of the world to east-central Illinois.

*

In March 2013, Douglas Ewart returned to Krannert for a performance with Wadada Leo Smith.

*

In November 2015, Ewart returned to Krannert for a performance with Quasar.

All Rabbits Must Die

Mr. McGregor would like this Flash game: All Rabbits Must Die. It’s fast and fun and Angry Birds-like and must not get in the way of work.

Write five sentences rabbit

“One, two, three, four, five, six leetle rabbits!” said Mr. McGregor.

“One, two, three, four, five, six leetle fat rabbits!” repeated Mr. McGregor, counting on his fingers — “one, two, three—”

“One, two, three, four! five! six leetle rabbits!” said he as he dropped them into his sack.

“One, two — only three sentences about rabbits!” said the homework-seeker, feeling slightly cheated.

“In the sack! one, two, three, four, five, six!” replied Mr. McGregor.

[Ever since I posted a commentary on five sentences from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Internauts searching for five sentences (that is, their homework) have been ending up at Orange Crate Art. Write five sentences rabbit is the latest such search. This post is rated “R” for rabbits. With apologies to Beatrix Potter and the Flopsy Bunnies.]

Other “five sentences” posts
Bleak House : The cat : Clothes : The driver : Life : Life on the moon : The past (1) : The past (2) : The ship : Smoking : The telephone

How to improve writing (no. 33)

In the Enfield Tennis Academy dining hall:

There’s a sign in a kitchen-staffer’s crude black block caps taped to the dispenser’s façade that says MILK IS FILLING; DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE. The sign used to say MILK IS FILLING, DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE until the comma was semicolonized by the insertion of a blue dot by a fairly obvious person.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

The fairly obvious person is Avril Incandenza, Enfield Tennis Academy Dean of Academic Affairs and of Females, “the only female academic ever to hold the Macdonald Chair in Prescriptive Usage at the Royal Victoria College of McGill University.” She’s a co-founder of the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, “a bramble in the flank of advertisers, corporations, and all fast-and-loose-players with the integrity of public discourse.” Among the MGM’s targets: supermarkets with 10 ITEMS OR LESS signs. Avril Incandenza, endnote 260 tells us, “always grades everything in blue ink.” Note the pun on colonize.

[This post is no. 33 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. This post is the first in which a fictional character has done the improving.]

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (via Pinboard)
How to punctuate a sentence
How to punctuate more sentences

Lines from Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 8, 1911.

A related post
Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar

Plagiarism in the academy

At Pennsylvania State University's Smeal College of Business, a “perfect storm of plagiarism,” as twenty-nine applicants to the MBA program plagiarize in their application essays. One of the required essay topics: “the connections between principled leadership and business.”

Related reading
All plagiarism posts

“Painters and Poets”

John Ashbery Jane Freilicher Larry Rivers Frank
    O’Hara
Their names alone bring tears to my eyes

Kenneth Koch, “The Circus” (The Art of Love, 1975)

Three slideshows — from the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Tibor de Nagy — for “Tibor de Nagy Painters and Poets,” an exhibition devoted to collaborations among painters and poets in post-war New York.