Ashford and Leiber

From the New York Times:

Nick Ashford, who with Valerie Simpson, his songwriting partner and later wife, wrote some of Motown’s biggest hits, like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough“ and “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” and later recorded their own hits and toured as a duo, died Monday at a hospital in New York City. He was 70 and lived in Manhattan.

Nick Ashford, of Motown Writing Duo, Dies at 70 (New York Times)

And from the Los Angeles Times:

Jerry Leiber, who with his songwriting partner Mike Stoller, created a songbook that infused the rock ’n’ roll scene of the 1950s and early ’60s with energy and mischievous humor, has died. He was 78.

Jerry Leiber dies at 78; lyricist in songwriting duo Leiber and Stoller (Los Angeles Times)

Just a dozen Leiber-Stoller songs: “Charlie Brown,” “Hound Dog,” “Is That All There Is?,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Love Potion Number Nine,” “Kansas City,” “On Broadway” (with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil), “Poison Ivy,” “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine,” “Searchin’,” “Stand By Me” (with Ben E. King), and “Yakety Yak.”

Recently updated

A just-updated post: Eschaton-inspired video. The New York Times reports that Michael Schur, who directed the Decemberists video, has acquired the film rights to Infinite Jest.

“Twenty years is a long time”

Heard while flipping channels this afternoon: Whoopi Goldberg on Oprah, speaking of the show’s longevity:

“Twenty years is a long time. It’s like a quarter of a century.”

But it’s exactly like . . .

Digital naïfs in the news

The five-campus ERIAL Project (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) has found that college students largely lack the skills to find and evaluate sources:

The most alarming finding in the ERIAL studies was perhaps the most predictable: when it comes to finding and evaluating sources in the Internet age, students are downright lousy. . . .

Throughout the interviews, students mentioned Google 115 times — more than twice as many times as any other database. The prevalence of Google in student research is well-documented, but the Illinois researchers found something they did not expect: students were not very good at using Google. They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources.

Says anthropology professor and study leader Andrew Asher, “I think it really exploded this myth of the ‘digital native.’ Just because you’ve grown up searching things in Google doesn’t mean you know how to use Google as a good research tool.”

Worse still: students lack the search skills to navigate scholarly databases. And not one of the students observed in the two-year study asked a librarian for help. Read more:

What Students Don't Know (Inside Higher Ed, via Boing Boing)

[Digital naïfs: my name for digital natives who are “in the dark, or at least in dimly-lit rooms, when it comes to digital technology.” More in this post.]

Eschaton-inspired video

The Decemberists have released an Infinite Jest-inspired video for “Calamity Song.” The specific inspiration: the novel’s Eschaton episode.

First Watch: The Decemberists, “Calamity Song” (NPR)

Update: The New York Times reports that Michael Schur, who directed this video, has the film rights to Infinite Jest.

[I’ll admit it: the Eschaton episode is my least-favorite part of Infinite Jest.]

Pocket notebook: The Lady in the Lake

[Lieutenant DeGarmot (Lloyd Nolan) takes notes. Note the bit of business in the background: two cops eating bananas.]

The Lady in the Lake (dir. Robert Montgomery, 1947) is an experiment in point of view, filmed from the perspective of its main character, Philip Marlowe (Montgomery), who is seen onscreen only in a mirror here and there. And that’s why Mildred Haveland (Jayne Meadows) appears to be aiming a gun at you. Yes, you. Look out!

I’m convinced that Meadows’s over-the-top performance in this film is a secret influence on Kristen Wiig.

Lloyd Nolan also appears in what be the most pencil-and-paper-centric film ever made, The House on 92nd Street (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1945).

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Union Station

Mitt Romney: the soul of a poet

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that Mitt Romney is seeking to bulldoze his 3,009-square-foot “oceanfront manse” in La Jolla, California, and replace it with an 11,062-square-foot manse.

Some might find this plan unseemly. They seem not to recognize that Mitt Romney has something of a poet’s soul. Consider his reason for living in La Jolla, at least when he’s not living in Massachusetts or New Hampshire at one of his other manses:

“I wanted to be where I could hear the waves,” Romney told a gaggle of media last year at a book signing in University City. “As a boy we spent summers on Lake Huron and I could hear the crashing waves at night. It was one of my favorite things in the world; being near the water and the waves was something I very badly wanted to experience again.”

Is it William Butler Yeats I hear in these words of longing? I believe it is.

I will arise now, and go to La Jolla,
And a large house build there, of brick and
    stucco made:
Nine bathrooms will I have there . . . .

Of course, the resemblance is not exact. Yeats didn’t build a small cabin in Innisfree and tear it down to build a larger cabin. He never even went to Innisfree. Romney went to La Jolla: he is more a man of action. Also, Romney didn’t build the first house. It was waiting for him when he got to La Jolla. Also, La Jolla is not a lake isle. As I said, not exact.

But get this: Romney’s $10-million New Hampshire manse stands by the edge of Lake Winnipesaukee. Yes, by the shores of Winnipesaukee, by the shining Big-Bucks-Water. A poet’s soul.

Related reading
The Bain of My Existence (Elaine’s adventures at Bain & Company)

[Details found via the Huffington Post. With apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Butler Yeats.]

Kurt Andersen on American politics

In the New York Times, Kurt Andersen writes about what’s wrong with American politics:

Sincere, passionate, hysterical belief that the country is full of (make-believe) anti-American enemies and (fictional) foreign horrors is the besetting national disease. And I’ve diagnosed the systemic problem: the American body politic suffers from autoimmune disorders.

It’s a compelling metaphor, but it’s really nothing new. Richard Hofstadter made the same diagnosis in psychological terms in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (Harper’s, November 1964). Here’s a sample:

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. . . .

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

It makes sense then that Michele Bachmann just warned against “the rise of the Soviet Union”: she’s operating from the mindset that Hofstadter described in 1964. As Andersen points out, autoimmune disorders are incurable.

William Deresiewicz on heroes

William Deresiewicz on the word heroes and what he calls “the cult of the uniform”:

Perhaps no word in public life of late has been more thoroughly debased by overuse. Soldiers are “heroes”; firefighters are “heroes”; police officers are “heroes” — all of them, not the special few who undoubtedly deserve the term. . . .

The irony is that our soldiers are the last people who are likely to call themselves heroes and are apparently very uncomfortable with this kind of talk.

An Empty Regard (New York Times)

Brian Wilson’s Disney album

From The Playlist, some details of Brian Wilson’s forthcoming In the Key of Disney. The song choices are sometimes spot on (“You’ve Got a Friend in Me”), sometimes cringe-inducing (“Can You Feel the Love Tonight”). The cover art looks to my eyes less like a sunset and more like a Disneyfied nuclear event. Yikes.

A true fact: Disney music has a prominent place in the Brian Wilson story: “When You Wish Upon a Star” inspired “Surfer Girl.” Another true fact: Wilson’s collaborator Van Dyke Parks arranged “The Bare Necessities” for Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967). That song is to appear on the forthcoming album: I wonder if VDP will be lending a hand.