Duke Ellington, Blackwing Johnson’s Baby Powder user

[Duke Ellington, Paramount Theater, New York, 1946. Photograph by William P. Gottlieb. Published in Down Beat, September 23, 1946. From the Library of Congress’s American Memory. Click for a larger view.]

Not a Blackwing pencil in sight, but this dressing-room scene is rich in detail. Notice the Johnson’s Baby Powder: another item that no doubt helped Ellington to create “timeless works of art.”

The context for this post, as explained in an earlier post: a pencil company’s choice to market its merchandise by using the Ellington name. The Blackwing is a celebrated pencil that California Cedar has recreated in replica form. The company’s choice to associate Ellington with its merchandise rests on a single photograph of Ellington with a Blackwing (the real thing, not the replica) that I posted on Orange Crate Art late last year.

We now have one photograph of Duke Ellington with Johnson’s Baby Powder, one photograph of Ellington wearing a sombrero, one photograph of Ellington playing a balalaika, and one photograph of Ellington writing with a Blackwing pencil. These single photographs do not support the conclusion that Ellington had any particular attachment to Johnson’s Baby Powder, sombreros, balalaikas, or Blackwings. In the absence of evidence of such attachment, capitalizing (pun intended) on the Ellington name seems to me a cynical way to sell pencils (or the other stuff).

California Cedar has removed Frank Lloyd Wright’s name from its marketing materials. It should remove Duke Ellington’s name as well.

March 29: I’m happy to report that Duke Ellington’s name no longer appears on the Blackwing Experience page. Thanks to Gunther and Sean for passing on the news.

Related posts
Duke Ellington, Blackwing pencils, and aspirational branding
All Blackwing posts (via Pinboard)
All Duke Ellington posts (via Pinboard)

[Some Ellington preferences: Beaujolais, Coca-Cola with extra sugar, coffee with lemon, hot water, Pall Mall cigarettes. These preferences are well documented.]

Duke Ellington, Blackwing sombrero user

[Photograph by Stanley Dance, 1968.]

The Ellington orchestra toured Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico in 1968. The album Latin American Suite followed in 1972. It stands to reason [crosses fingers] that a sombrero must have inspired the music therein. My claim rests on this one photograph, which appears in Derek Jewell’s Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977).

Thus far: one photograph of Duke Ellington wearing a sombrero, one photograph of Ellington playing a balalaika, and one photograph of Ellington writing with a Blackwing pencil. “The state of facts and evidence” does not support the conclusion that Ellington had any particular attachment to sombreros, balalaikas, or Blackwing pencils. A pencil manufacturer’s association of the Ellington name with its replica version of the Blackwing pencil is a matter of very wishful thinking. Some might call such marketing cynical and misleading.

Why do I care? The balalaika post explains.

March 29: I’m happy to report that Duke Ellington’s name no longer appears on the Blackwing Experience page. Thanks to Gunther and Sean for passing on the news.

Related posts
All Blackwing posts (via Pinboard)
All Duke Ellington posts (via Pinboard)

[“Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”: John Adams, Blackwing quill user.]

Duke Ellington, Blackwing balalaika user

[“Jam Session in the U.S.S.R., 1971.” From Duke Ellington’s Music Is My Mistress (1973). Photographer unidentified.]

Look: it’s Duke Ellington, and he’s playing a balalaika. Can we leap to the conclusion that this instrument helped him create “timeless works of art”? Sure we can. Can you prove that it didn’t happen?

If you’re tuning in late, the context for this post is a pencil company’s choice to market its merchandise by using the Ellington name. The Blackwing is a celebrated pencil that California Cedar has recreated in replica form. The company’s choice to associate Ellington with its merchandise rests on exactly one photograph of Ellington with a Blackwing (the real thing, not the replica) that I posted late last year.

Why I care: I’ve been listening to Duke Ellington for about thirty-six years, and I don’t like seeing his name used in a tacky commercial ploy. And I think that facts ought to remain stubborn things. John Adams, as quoted in David McCullough’s 2001 biography: “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” The state of facts and evidence — a single photograph — does not support the conclusion that Duke Ellington had any particular attachment to the Blackwing pencil.

And if you’ve decided that you should really listen to some Ellington music, this post suggests the best place to start.

March 29: I’m happy to report that Duke Ellington’s name no longer appears on the Blackwing Experience page. Thanks to Gunther and Sean for passing on the news.

Related posts
Duke Ellington, Blackwing sombrero user
Duke Ellington, Blackwing Johnson’s Baby Powder user
All Blackwing posts (via Pinboard)
All Duke Ellington posts (via Pinboard)

Tonight's Mad Men

[No spoilers here.]

Tonight’s Mad Men (the first episode of the show’s fifth season) was to my mind dreary and disappointing. I started watching Mad Men in its second season and grew disenchanted when Frank O’Hara’s poem “Mayakovsky,” which figured so importantly in that season’s first episode, turned out to be a MacGuffin, playing no significant role in the season’s story line, not even in its final episode, though that episode was named after O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency (1957), the book that includes “Mayakovsky.” Oh well. I came back in season four and found the show more engaging.

Tonight’s episode though was another matter. Watching Mad Men is not like watching a television show set in the 1960s; it’s like watching a television show that has been made to appear to be set in the 1960s. The markers of “the time” are so unartfully contrived: A protest scene equals “Negroes, priests, and cops.” A discussion of advertising for Heinz Beans includes a suggestion that an ad be pitched to college students “sitting in.” A journalist introduces himself by explaining that he writes for “underground papers, mostly.” Someone even speaks of smoking “tea.” Yes, something is happening here, and you do know what it is, don’t you, Mr. Jones, and you keep making sure that we know that you know too.

What most disappointed me in tonight’s episode though was the plodding, uninspired dialogue. My new experiment in watching Mad Men is to imagine that I’m reading its dialogue as subtitles, a trick that makes the show both more and less interesting. To modify a line from an old commercial: Try it. You might like it.

[With apologies to Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” and Alka-Seltzer.]

The Snatchel Project

“If they have their own, they can leave ours alone!” The Snatchel Project. Possibly NSFW.

[Thanks, Elaine and Carrie.]

“I think about my own kids”

President Obama has commented on the killing of Trayvon Martin: “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.” Same here.

Duke Ellington, Blackwing pencils, and aspirational branding

Sean at Blackwing Pages offers a playful and erudite response to the latest efforts of a certain pencil manufacturer to associate its product with great artists, composers, and writers who may have used the pencil that said manufacturer has now recreated in replica form. You can guess the pencil’s name, yes?

Of particular interest to me is California Cedar’s identification of Duke Ellington as someone who used the Blackwing pencil to create “timeless works of art.” The sole basis for this claim would appear to be a post that I made late last year with a photograph in which Ellington has a Blackwing in hand. There are any number of photographs of Ellington writing music. In just this one, to my knowledge, is he using a Blackwing pencil. More important: there appears to be no evidence that Ellington had any particular attachment to the Blackwing pencil, or to any writing instrument. If there is such evidence, California Cedar hasn’t offered it. (If there is such evidence, I’d like to know about it.) Given Ellington’s indiscriminate choice of writing materials — hotel stationery, menus, napkins — in other words, whatever was at hand, the possibility that he had a favorite brand of pencil seems remote. For all we know, the pencil in the photograph may be a borrowed one.

To paraphrase something I said to Sean: it’s curious that as Moleskine steps back from the abyss of aspirational branding (“the legendary notebook of Hemingway, Picasso, and Chatwin”), California Cedar has jumped in, head first, without even putting on a helmet.

March 29: I’m happy to report that Duke Ellington’s name no longer appears on the Blackwing Experience page. Thanks to Gunther and Sean for passing on the news.

April 10: Sigh. Ellington’s name still appears in what appear to be California Cedar press releases. Here’s an example. And the company now claims that John Lennon was rumored to use Blackwings. That’s nonsense.

Related posts
Duke Ellington, Blackwing balalaika user
Duke Ellington, Blackwing sombrero user
Duke Ellington, Blackwing Johnson’s Baby Powder user
All Blackwing posts (via Pinboard)
All Duke Ellington posts (via Pinboard)

[In Duke Ellington in Person (1979), Mercer Ellington describes the materials that came to form his father’s Music Is My Mistress (1973) as written on hotel stationery, menus, and napkins.]

VDP on starting out in the arts

At the Huffington Post, the transcript of an interview with Van Dyke Parks, to be broadcast and streamed today (1:00 p.m. Central) on KRUU-FM. Here is VDP’s advice for those starting out in the arts:

I can only say to remember what Vic Chesnutt said: “There is no shelter in the arts.” It is uncertain by definition. It flies in the face of the five-year plan. But it must be pursued with a discipline, a willingness to learn stuff that seems irrelevant. In terms of music, music should be read to be believed. You can always abandon a page, but if it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage. And that’s the truth. So it takes work of a disciplined sort, but it also takes an incredible power of forgiveness and a desire to serve, and openly, without any cosmetic advantage, stripped and bleeding, to bare your soul, so that someone else might feel exalted and able to rise for another occasion. You must learn to give if you want to pursue the arts.

[I’ve corrected the KRUU transcript and added a link to the Wikipedia aticle about Vic Chestnutt.]

Trudel’s Truth

Trudel’s Truth publishes the letters Trudel Adler began writing to her family in Germany after she came to the United States in 1934. Here’s an article about Leonard Grossman, Trudel’s son, who is putting his mother’s letters (in her translation) online: Blogging the past, one letter at a time (Chicago Tribune).

[Thanks to Music Clip of the Day.]

Millennial wines

“I’m embarrassed that this is what they think people my age want”: Hopes of the wine industry rest on millennial shoulders (Washington Post).