Tendered buttons

From an argument against attaching Like, Retweet, and +1 buttons to online content:

In a medium full of advertisement and self-promotion, every unnecessary pixel of noise and “click-me!”-begging should be avoided if it can be.

Oliver Reichenstein, Sweep the Sleaze (iA, via Daring Fireball)

Note the deft hyphenation: “‘click-me!’-begging.” I like that. But I have never liked buttons and have never added them to Orange Crate Art posts. To my eyes, buttons are a distraction. Rather than click, I prefer to leave comments, send links to relevant family members, friends, and associates, and write about items of interest here. As I just have.

[Yes, the post title is an unnecessary Gertrude Stein pun.]

Maira Kalman on her daily routine

The artist Maira Kalman, asked whether she has a daily routine:

Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind. There’s a lot of walking in the morning, and coffee, and reading the obituaries. And by that time, I’m probably ready to start working. And also a deadline is a really good thing. A deadline is probably the biggest inspiration to get going — more than anything else.

Maira Kalman: The Pursuit of Happiness (The 99 Percent)

Virginia Woolf on second-hand books

We are walking through the wintry streets of London:

But here, none too soon, are the second-hand book-shops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. The very sight of the bookseller’s wife with her foot on the fender, sitting beside a good coal fire, screened from the door, is sobering and cheerful. She is never reading, or only the newspaper; her talk, when it leaves bookselling, which it does so gladly, is about hats; she likes a hat to be practical, she says, as well as pretty. Oh no, they don’t live at the shop; they live in Brixton; she must have a bit of green to look at. In summer a jar of flowers grown in her own garden is stood on the top of some dusty pile to enliven the shop. Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. There is always a hope, as we reach down some grayish-white book from an upper shelf, directed by its air of shabbiness and desertion, of meeting here with a man who set out on horseback over a hundred years ago to explore the woollen market in the Midlands and Wales; an unknown traveller, who stayed at inns, drank his pint, noted pretty girls and serious customs, wrote it all down stiffly, laboriously for sheer love of it (the book was published at his own expense); was infinitely prosy, busy, and matter-of-fact, and so let flow in without his knowing it the very scent of hollyhocks and the hay together with such a portrait of himself as gives him forever a seat in the warm corner of the mind’s inglenook. One may buy him for eighteen pence now. He is marked three and sixpence, but the bookseller’s wife, seeing how shabby the covers are and how long the book has stood there since it was bought at some sale of a gentleman’s library in Suffolk, will let it go at that.

Viriginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1930)

[The pencil-minded may want to know that this essay begins: “No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil.” The pretext for the journey is the purchase of a pencil.]

Doc Watson (1923–2012)

Sad news tonight in the New York Times: the guitarist and singer Doc Watson has died. This man was a giant — though it feels superfluous to say so. Here is a YouTube sampler of his art:

“House of the Rising Sun” (with Clarence Ashley) : “Deep River Blues” : “Southbound” (with Merle Watson) : “Summertime” (with David Grisman and Jack Lawrence) : “Black Mountain Rag” (with Jack Lawrence)

Fathers and sons and ringtones

I was waiting on line in Barnes and Noble. The lone cashier, thirty or so, was talking to the customer at the register about the Nook. The cashier said that he was resolved to acquaint himself with every new development in “technology” — which no doubt meant end-user digital technology. The one thing that he didn’t want, the cashier said, was to turn into his father. Why, it took his father a month to figure out how to add different Lady Gaga ringtones to his phone for different numbers.

Sigh. A good son would not let his father fumble for a month setting up Lady Gaga ringtones. A good son would at once dissuade his father from adding even one Lady Gaga ringtone to the phone. It’s so inappropriate.

[Waiting on line in a chain bookstore these days makes me sad. I hear the World of Tomorrow laughing at me.]

The Beach Boys in Newsweek

A member of Brian Wilson’s band speaks:

“When my friends hear I’m touring with the Beach Boys, they’re like, ‘Oh, so you’re doing fairgrounds and stuff?’” he says. “And I’m like, ‘No, we’re with Brian Wilson.’ But, you know, when we performed Pet Sounds and Smile, that was art. That was Brian. Now we are kind of at the fairgrounds.”

From Andrew Romano’s long report on the Beach Boys’ summer reunion tour: The Beach Boys’ Crazy Summer (Newsweek).

A related post
Beach Boys reunion dream

Memorial Day

One hundred years ago. From “10,000 Will March on Decoration Day. About Fifty Posts Will Be Escorted by G.A.R. Regulars and National Guardsmen.” New York Times, May 29, 1912.

[G.A.R.: Grand Army of the Republic.]

Misses Rheingold

The New York Times reports on a reunion of Misses Rheingold (or Miss Rheingolds). The reunion took place in conjunction with a New-York Historical Society exhibit on beer in New York City: Beer Here: Brewing New York’s History.

For New Yorkers of a certain age, Rheingold is synonymous with beer. I knew the jingle, or one version of it, as a child:

My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer.
Ask for Rheingold whenever you buy beer.
It’s refreshing, not sweet;
It’s the extra-dry treat.
Won’t you try extra-dry Rheingold beer?

Here is a ninety-three-year-old woman singing another version of the lyrics. And here is a commercial with a third version.

On the rare occasions when my parents split a can of beer with lunch on a Saturday or Sunday, I would have a sip in a Dixie. Cold cuts, potato salad, and beer still seem to me to constitute the Platonic form of lunch.

A related post
SCHAEFER

[I knew the Schaefer jingle too. Is it so wrong for a child to sing beer jingles?]

Ellington and an iPhone app

InstaCRT is an iPhone app that projects a photograph onto a CRT (cathode ray tube) in Sweden and returns a photograph of the resulting image. That’s nice.

What interests me more though is the music in the app’s demo video. “What is that music?” I asked myself. And a voice replied, “It’s a slowed-down loop of the first four bars of ‘The Brown-Skin Gal in the Calico Gown,’ by Duke Ellington and Paul Francis Webster.” Here is the 1941 Ellington recording, with Herb Jeffries singing.

Minimalist iPad stand

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

It’s a doorstop, or an iStop, two dollars or so at the hardware store. The minimalist-est stand I could get.

Other repurposed household items
Bakeware as laptop stand
Dish drainer as file tray
Tea tin as index-card holder
Wine cork as iPad stand