A mistaken bit of iPad folklore

Fraser Speirs demolishes a mistaken bit of iPad folklore about apps in the multitasking bar. John Gruber says Speirs is right.

Mac recommendation: AppDelete

Helping Elaine with a computer problem yesterday made me remember how much I like Reggie Ashworth’s Mac app AppDelete. AppDelete removes apps and their associated files and folders — the bits and pieces left behind when one drags an app to the trash. AppDelete is modestly priced ($7.99), and its developer is a good guy. My only connection is that of a happily paid-up user.

How to improve writing (no. 37)

From an NPR underwriting plug for OfficeMax: “offering Forever stamps, like at the post office.”

Like at the post office, like on NPR! The awkward “like at” aside, it makes little sense to tout the stamps sold (not offered) at OfficeMax as the same stamps sold at the post office.

Better: “selling Forever stamps, saving you a trip to the post office.”

[This post is no. 37 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts

Movie recommendation: Jiro Dreams of Sushi

David Gelb’s Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) is a beautiful film about work and life and happiness. For Jiro Ono, an eighty-five-year-old sushi master, they are one: his work is his life and his greatest happiness. “I feel ecstatic all day,” he says to the camera. “I love making sushi.” Sukiyabashi Jiro, Ono’s ten-seat sushi bar, is the most modest of settings for the pursuit of ecstasy: it sits in a Tokyo subway station. It is nonetheless a Michelin three-star restaurant. Here, and in a son’s two-star restaurant, and in a fish market, we see Jiro and company patiently seeking perfection.

I’m no foodie, and this film, as I suspected, is no foodie affair. There are gorgeous close-ups of sushi, certainly, but the emphasis is on dedicated practice: the same tools, the same motions, put to use again and again with new supplies of the same materials (fish and rice). Ono is seeking “the top,” but as he explains, “no one knows where the top is.” So keep going. Is the fish a little tough? Marinate it longer. If you think rice is a simple matter — well, it isn’t, at least not for Ono and his rice merchant. The willingness to look more and more deeply so as to discover ways to improve or reinvent one’s work offers a model for every form of endeavor. I’d love to show this film to a class of writing students.

You can learn more about Jiro Dreams of Sushi at the film’s website (the source of the photograph above). If you watch the trailer, bear in mind that the film is far less busy and far more thoughtful.

Dial-a-Poem

From the Museum of Modern Art: Dial-a-Poem. Keep clicking the blue icon for more selections. Or call 347-POET001 repeatedly.

[The MoMA page may have problems in Chrome.]

More on “Kokomo”

Arkhonia, too, dislikes it.

A related post
A musical analogy

A musical analogy

“Kokomo” : The Beach Boys :: “What a Wonderful World” : Louis Armstrong. Both songs hugely known, both songs woefully unrepresentative. The one is missing Brian Wilson’s participation as writer, arranger, or musician. The other is missing a trumpet. At least “Hello, Dolly!” had a trumpet solo.

How many musicians and writers are best known for some small unrepresentative part of their work? There’s William Butler Yeats and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” There’s William Carlos Williams and “The Red Wheelbarrow.” “Williams, is he the one with the wheelbarrow?” someone once asked me. Well, yes and no.

[Could Louis Armstrong redeem “Kokomo”? It’s strangely pleasant to imagine.]

Beach Boys reunion dream

I dreamed last night that Elaine and I attended a Beach Boys reunion concert. This dream will never come true, as I have no interest in seeing the reconstituted group in my waking life.¹

We arrived a little late, which left me unfazed, and walked down a sloped floor to third-row center seats in a half-empty auditorium. Brian Wilson and Mike Love sat on armless office chairs downstage. Behind them a backing band played on a riser. The other members of the reconstituted group — Al Jardine, David Marks, Bruce Johnston — filled out the front line. Or must have: they were unrecognizable from where I sat. The group was performing “Do It Again,” with Brian and Mike chatting their way through the song. During an instrumental break, Mike leaned close to Brian to say “This doesn’t work anymore.” Brian nodded. At another point, Bruce declared “I don’t care what he says: Christmastime is the best time.” And the group played “Little Saint Nick.” I would like to know who he is: I suspect it must be Mike, with whom Bruce has toured for years under the Beach Boys name.

At intermission, we saw Dennis Wilson, looking young and healthy, more or less as he does on the cover of the album 20/20. He was pushing a grand piano up the aisle to the rear of the auditorium. Also during intermission: a short film showing a man staring at a woman’s breasts. This film was a commercial against breast cancer.

After intermission, the group began with “’Til I Die,” which might be the last great Brian Wilson song. The five Beach Boys and the members of the backing band spread across the stage in the manner of the cast of Rent singing “Seasons of Love.” Those standing stage right wore firefighting gear; those in the center, hazmat suits; those stage left, scuba gear. I couldn’t tell who was wearing what. Among those in scuba gear, a dwarf standing on a chair. I recognized him as an important figure in Beach Boys history.

Anyone who knows the Beach Boys story will likely make something of some of the odd details here. Me, I’m only the dreamer, who wrote it all down upon waking.

¹ Why no interest? I’ve seen Brian Wilson on the Pet Sounds and SMiLE tours. But the reunion tour seems to me to have more to do with money than art. I think that the art of the Beach Boys is now best enjoyed on record.

Things I learned on my summer vacation (2012)

Q: Why did King Kong climb the Empire State Building?

A: He was too big to fit in the elevator.

*

It is possible to get a Hi and Lois panel (or any online image) into Blogger using an iPad, like so: Take screenshot. Download TouchUp Lite (free image-editor) and crop screenshot. Upload resulting picture to Picasa. Add appropriate URL to draft.

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In Pittsburgh, Leena’s Food is a tiny restaurant that serves great Middle Eastern food. Mohammed Issa’s claim to have the best falafel in the city — and perhaps anywhere — is easy to believe.

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In Manhattan, Maharaja Palace has an excellent lunch buffet. But the restaurant is small and needs to turn its tables: if you linger over lunch and then decide to stay on for tea, you’ll be warned that the preparation will take a very long time. Or at least we were so warned. (Is it sun tea they’re making?)

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For those on the road, Whole Foods is a good choice for a quick lunch or dinner. Go to the Prepared Foods sector and grab a cardboard receptacle and some cutlery.

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William Buehler Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929), a study of Haitian Vodou, has illustrations by Alexander King. Seabrook seems to have been a scary man. Our friend Margie King Barab was married to Alex.

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By the way, Elaine has written several posts about the composer Seymour Barab (Margie’s husband). Elaine knew Seymour for several years (via correspondence and phone calls) before we all met face to face. (But I knew that already.)

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Dorothy Wegman Raphaelson was one of the last two surviving Ziegfeld Girls. She was married to playwright and screenwriter Samuel Raphaelson (who appears in this 2009 post). A photograph of DWR on her hundredth birthday shows her elegant and joyful in Central Park.

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At the theater, Al Hirschfeld sketched without looking, using a pad and pencil in his pocket.

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Hirschfeld’s pink townhouse (122 East 95th Street) is for sale: $5,295,000. No, it’s sold.

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The exhibition “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde” has two paintings I’ve long wanted to see: Juan Gris’s Flowers (1914) and Marie Laurencin’s Apollinaire and His Friends (1909). Gris’s painting (from a private collection) plays a part in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923). (But I knew that already.)

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Seeing Flowers itself makes clear what reproductions barely suggest: the work is largely a collage; its flowers are cut and pasted. Now I better understand what Joseph Cornell might have seen in Gris’s work.

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“The Steins Collect” is a reminder of the ugly, often despicable cultural and political attitudes of early-twentieth-century modernists. How did Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas manage to remain in France and get through the Second War? Here is a dossier on the matter, with various points of view. My two cents: calling Stein’s relationship to Vichy “complex” and “complicated” (words that appear and reappear in the work of Stein’s defenders) is not persuasive. That Stein was sympathetic to fascism and enjoyed the friendship and protection of the collaborator Bernard Faÿ seems to me to make it relatively easy to think things through.

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“The Steins Collect” is also a reminder of the role money plays in art: Americans abroad, income from rental properties, things to buy. Money, money, money.

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Roy Peter Clark’s The Glamour of Grammar (2011) looks like it might be a helpful book in teaching writing.

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The bookstore where Harvey Pekar takes Anthony Bourdain in the Cleveland episode of No Reservations? Zubal Books.

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Manhattan’s “secret bookstore,” Brazenhead Books, the subject of a short 2011 film, is a great used-book store, a store in which every book is a good one (or better than good). Our greatest finds: two books by Alex King, and a third that he illustrated. Talk about luck.

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The arranger and composer Nelson Riddle attended Ridgefield Ridgewood High School in New Jersey. (Jonathan Schwartz got it wrong.)

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New Jersey is benighted. In an effort to save money, the state has turned off many of its highway lights. It feels strange and at least slightly dangerous to be parsing overhead signage in the dark. I feel sorry for the unfortunate traveler who does not already know the way.

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Elaine’s great-grandfather was a forest assayer in Russia and a presser in a tailor’s shop in Philadelphia.

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The instruments in the Frederick Historic Piano Collection might change one’s sense of “the piano”: these instruments differ greatly in tone from the modern piano and from one another. The collection is the work of Elaine’s elementary-school music teacher and her husband. One piano’s sound reminded us of the massive Beckwith upright in our collection. (That piano is our collection.)

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A corkscrew is also known as a “wine key.”

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The Vinturi is a small device that aerates wine, making a marked difference in taste and aroma.

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Winemakers use isinglass to clarify, uhh, wine.

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Jiro Dreams of Sushi (dir. David Gelb, 2011) is a beautifully filmed meditation on work and happiness. In this film, they are one. Jiro Ono: “I feel ecstatic all day. I love making sushi.”

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Gloria Swanson’s thirty-two-room Englewood, New Jersey villa was called Gloria Crest. The house was named not for Swanson but for the wife of the Polish noble who built it in 1926. My dad did tile work there, after Swanson’s time.

*

Prescient may be pronounced in surprising ways. The American Heritage Dictionary gives four pronunciations:

prĕsh′ ənt, -ē-ənt, prē′ shənt, -shē-ənt

I appreciate knowing (finally) that there’s a sh sound in prescient.

*

Did you know that you can listen to episodes of the radio serial Dragnet in podcast form?

Episodes — you mean whole ones?

That’s right, complete episodes.

Start to finish?

That’s right.

And you say they’re available as a podcast?

Yeah, that’s right, a podcast. Free too.

Well then, it seems that there’s only one thing to do.

What’s that?

Listen.

*

It is a great gift to have friends from other generations. (But I knew that already.)

[Our friends Seymour Barab and Margie King Barab, waiting for the light to change. New York, May 2012.]

More things I learned on my summer vacation
2011 : 2010 : 2009 : 2008 : 2007 : 2006

[Summer: the time between the spring and fall semesters, regardless of season.]

Domestic comedy

“Did I ever tell you about the etymology of apple?”

“No.”

[Discourse follows on Genesis, the pomegranate, and la pomme de terre.]

“But where does the word apple come from?”

“I don’t remember.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (via Pinboard)