Naming Apple

The two Steves, in the beginning:

Now that they had decided to start a business, they needed a name. Jobs had gone for another visit to the All One Farm, where he had been pruning the Gravenstein apple trees, and Wozniak picked him up at the airport. On the ride down to Los Altos, they bandied around options. They considered some typical tech words, such as Matrix, and some neologisms, such as Executek, and some straightforward boring names, like Personal Computers Inc. The deadline for deciding was the next day, when Jobs wanted to start filing the papers. Finally Jobs proposed Apple Computer. “I was on one of my fruitarian diets,” he explained. “I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’ Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book.” He told Wozniak that if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with Apple. And they did.

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

Apple Computer, Inc. is now Apple Inc., no comma. “Apple,” unlike, say, “Executek,” is a name built to last.

Also from Walter Isaacson’s biography
Steve Jobs at college (and typos)

[The All One Farm: an Oregon commune founded by Jobs’s Reed College friend Richard Friedland.]

Inara G. and Van Dyke P. in LA

Through it all Parks was as entertaining between songs as he was in the midst of them, touching upon everything from Qantas to Darwinism and referring to the concert itself as “a testament to durable goods.”

From Sean J. O’Connell’s review of Inara George and Van Dyke Parks’s November 5 performance at the Getty Center (LA Weekly Blogs).

A related post
On George and Parks’s An Invitation

The Parks mark

Van Dyke Parks, Arrangements, Volume 1.
Bananastan B3300. 2011.
Playing time: 39:28.

Arrangements, Volume 1 is the first of two compilations of Van Dyke Parks’s work as an arranger, on his own recordings and others’. (Parks has worked with many, many musicians: here’s an incomplete list.) Each of the fifteen selections here bears the Parks mark of sonic density and tonal variety, which makes for a jukebox of considerable range and sophistication: calypso (with Bonnie Raitt), funk (with Little Feat), a production number (with Ry Cooder), reggae (with a very plausible Dino Martin), straightfaced soft-rock (with Sal Valentino), and Tex-Mex (with Lowell George).

Most appealing to me are this album’s early (and until now relatively inaccessible) Parks recordings: the swirling keyboards and umpteen (I’d say nine) key changes of “Donovan’s Colours” (the 45 mono mix, released under the pseudonym George Washington Brown), the bright choiring voices of “Come to the Sunshine,” the brass-heavy fits and starts of “Out on the Rolling Sea,” an orchestral interpretation of the Bahamian guitarist Joseph Spence’s idiosyncratic style (in Spence’s signature key of D), and “Ice Capades,” a forty-four-second flurry of synthesizer high jinks created for a late-sixties Ice Capades commercial. And perhaps best of all, Parks’s version of “The Eagle and Me,” whose bassoon, oboe, and percussive clicks and rasps suggest a happily creaking and croaking menagerie. It’s a rare musician who can take up the songs of Joseph Spence and Harold Arlen and make them both sound like parts of his own soul. Onward to the next volume.

Track listings at Bananastan Records.

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts (via Pinboard)

Colgate Optic White

I find it impossible to decide what’s more plausible: that the name Colgate Optic White is the work of a snarky creative type who’s read Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952), or that this new toothpaste just happens to share its name with one of that novel’s most important tropes of color and invisibility. Either way, I’m buying a tube as soon as possible to remember this odd intersection of art and commerce.

In Ellison’s novel, Optic White is the signature product of Liberty Paints, where the narrator, adrift in New York City, has gone to see about a job. Optic White suggests a range of matters: appearances (color as what meets the eye), invisibility (Lucius Brockway, an African-American genius of paint, mixes Optic White in the factory basement), masks (Optic White will cover anything, even a chunk of coal), the melting pot (a black liquid stirred into the paint leaves a grey tinge), whiteness as what’s officially American (Optic White is used on government buildings), and xenophobia (“Keep America Pure with Liberty Paints” is one company slogan). Brockway had a hand in another slogan: “If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White.”¹ Gosh, that’d make a great toothpaste slogan too, wouldn’t it?

¹ The slogan reminds the novel’s anonymous narrator of “a childhood jingle”: “If you’re white, you’re right.” Ellison in a 1954 Paris Review interview:

Q: Can you give us an example of the use of folklore in your own novel?

A: Well, there are certain themes, symbols, and images which are based on folk material. For example, there is the old saying among Negroes: If you’re black, stay back; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re white, you’re right.

Related posts
Barack Obama and Ralph Ellison
Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
Invitation to a dance (A passage from Invisible Man)
Three inaugural moments (“when white will embrace what is right”)

Allen Mandelbaum (1926–2011)

The translator Allen Mandelbaum has died at the age of eighty-five. From the New York Times obituary:

Mr. Mandelbaum was well known for his translations of the modern Italian poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, and for his Aeneid, which won the National Book Award in 1973. His verse translation of The Divine Comedy was published in three volumes by the University of California Press in the early 1980s and was later brought out by Bantam in an inexpensive paperback edition that is still used widely in college courses.

I like his Dante and Metamorphoses. Looking at Inferno this morning, I thought this last line of Canto I a fitting tribute to Mandelbaum’s work:

Then he set out, and I moved on behind him.

That’s Dante of course, speaking of Virgil. Like Virgil, the translator too is a guide to what might otherwise remain inaccessible.

Sam Fink (1916–2011)

The artist and calligrapher Sam Fink has died at the age of ninety-five. From the New York Times obituary:

A grandson of Jewish immigrants to the United States from Russia and Poland, Mr. Fink dedicated the last four decades of his life (after retiring as an advertising art director) to hand-lettering, illustrating and commenting on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address and the Book of Exodus.

In 2009 Mr. Fink was the subject of a lovely Wall Street Journal article by his cousin Bob Davis: Through Letters, a Family History Unveiled.

“Incompatible with real democracy”

Paul Krugman:

But why does this growing concentration of income and wealth in a few hands matter? Part of the answer is that rising inequality has meant a nation in which most families don’t share fully in economic growth. Another part of the answer is that once you realize just how much richer the rich have become, the argument that higher taxes on high incomes should be part of any long-run budget deal becomes a lot more compelling.

The larger answer, however, is that extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy.

Oligarchy, American Style (New York Times)

Apple thanks

I called Apple support recently to solve a minor paperwork problem (first call in four years). Apple then sent me a link to an online form asking for my feedback. I filled out the form and found this image at the end. Nice.

I bet my friend Norman can identify every language here with no peeking. Let’s see.

Teresa Wright, Teresa Wright

[As May in Roseland (dir. James Ivory, 1977).]

[As Peggy Stephenson in The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946). With Dana Andrews as Fred Derry.]

Teresa Wright is one of my favorite actresses. That facial expression in Roseland struck me as something straight out of The Best Years of Our Lives or Shadow of a Doubt (dir. Alfred HItchcock, 1943). I have tried my best to find an equivalent.

Filmed in New York’s Roseland Ballroom, Roseland is a strange and beautiful film, made of three vignettes of love and loss: “The Waltz,” “The Hustle,” and “The Peabody.” It’s a Merchant Ivory film, screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but as Elaine suggested, Roseland feels more like something by Fellini.

Related posts
Teresa Wright (1918–2005)
Teresa Wright, anti-starlet
Shadow of a Doubt, on location

[An unexpected benefit of seeing Roseland: learning from my dad that his parents met at the Roseland Ballroom. Whose band would have been playing?]

String-bag hack

Elaine Fine (Mrs. Orange Crate Art) has figured out a nifty way to keep string bags from getting tangled up inside her shoulder bag.

A related post
String bags FTW