Sad sight of the day

At the front end of my local multinational retail corporation, two employees stood inviting customers to try the self-checkout. In other words, the store is paying some of its employees, at least for now, to get customers to do the work that those same employees could do. The long-term goal: more self-checkout use, fewer employees.

[I mean, of course, associates, not employees.]

Jazz on Route 66

A first-season Route 66 episode features a Chet Baker-like trumpeter. The second-season episode “Goodnight Sweet Blues” (aired October 6, 1961) is even more jazz-centric. Ethel Waters plays Jenny Henderson, a retired singer in failing health who commissions Tod and Buz (the latter a self-identified jazz “buff”) to find and bring to her the members of the Memphis Naturals, the band she performed and recorded with thirty years earlier. She shows our heroes a photograph:


[The fictional Naturals: Snooze Mobley, Hank Plummer, King Loomis, A. C. Graham, Horace Wilson, Lover Brown.]

Two of the Naturals, Jenny says, became famous: Snooze Mobley and A. C. Graham. You may, however, recognize three familiar faces in this photograph. The first: Coleman Hawkins as clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Snooze Mobley. Buz (George Maharis) tracks him down in San Francisco, where he’s leading a quartet.



In keeping with his sleepy nickname, Snooze is virtually speechless. This open-eyed nod from the bandstand signals that he will come to Pittsburgh. When he later says “Mmhmm,” Jenny tells him he’s becoming a blabbermouth.

The second familiar face: the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, who plays A. C. Graham, now a busy studio musician in New York. He has to check his datebook and get someone to cover four upcoming jobs before telling Tod (Martin Milner) that he can visit Jenny.



The third familiar face: the drummer Jo Jones as the Naturals’ leader Lover Brown. Lover is doing a short stretch in Kansas City for yet another act of bigamy. Tod arranges a furlough so that Lover can visit “a sick sister.” Along for the ride: a prison official, whom Lover introduces as his manager.


[Notice that Jones is wearing a toupee for the prop photograph above.]

The Eldridge-Jones instrument switch was meant as an inside joke, I suppose, though the joke must have been obvious to a good many viewers. What just a few viewers may have known is that Eldridge indeed played drums, and Jones played piano and trumpet.

As for the other Naturals: Banjoist Hank Plummer died in Philadelphia. His guitarist son Hank Jr. (Bill Gunn) comes in his place. Bassist Horace Wilson (Frederick O’Neal), the scholar of the group, has become a lawyer in Chicago and lost his calluses. And trombonist King Loomis (Juano Hernandez), now a shoeshine man living in East St. Louis, has pawned his horn, lost his lip, and feels great misgivings about even picking up an instrument.

What happens as the story unfolds is fairly predictable: the episode’s title should give you an idea of where things go. What’s unexpected is the opportunity to see great musicians in speaking roles. And seeing Ethel Waters and Jo Jones sing a duet is, really, a once-in-a-lifetime thing.





Waters and Jones are reputed to have been “difficult” personalities. You’d never know it here: they radiate good will and joy. (Perhaps that’s why it’s called acting.) Waters received an Emmy nomination for her performance in this episode (Outstanding Single Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role), the first Emmy nomination for an African-American. She lost to Julie Harris (as Queen Victoria, Hallmark Hall of Fame).


[The Naturals minus one. Brown’s manager in the background.]


[King Loomis joins in. Buz on the right.]

A strange detail: the recording of “I’m Coming Virginia” that plays as Tod and Buz visit Jenny is not by Waters but by Marni Nixon. She explained in a 1996 interview:


[Stephen Bourne, Ethel Waters: Stormy Weather (2007).]

Related reading and listening
Ethel Waters, “I’m Coming Virginia” (YouTube)
Other Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

Jean Stapleton (1923–2013)

[“‘My husband doesn’t have the male chauvinist attitude that the woman’s place is in the kitchen,’ she says of her personal life. ‘He likes to be married to a woman who has more interests outside the home.’” From a New York Times article, “Jean Stapleton Hopes Most Wives Aren’t Like Edith,” May 17, 1972. Photograph by Jack Manning.]

The Times has a lengthy obituary: Jean Stapleton, Who Played Archie Bunker’s Better Angel, Dies at 90. The 1972 article adds: “‘He can cook and he can take care of the children. In that way, he is liberated too. Yes, he really gets a high mark from me.’” Stapleton’s husband William Putch died in 1983.

Some recent comments

The Anti-Digit Dialing League Now with the logic of area codes, explained in three comments — 1, 2, 3 — from S F Pete and Neal McClain.

San José profs nix Harvard MOOC Now with a comment from San José State’s Tom Leddy (no relation).

The more I read and write, the more I subscribe to Elaine Fine’s theory of knowledge: “What I know is rivaled only by what I do not know.”

Completely Naked City

A twenty-nine-DVD set, Naked City: The Complete Series is available for pre-order, with all 138 episodes. List: $179. Amazon’s pre-order price: $99. Naked City has been an abiding interest in the Fine-and-Leddy household for well over a year. I am happy to see that the zeitgeist has straightened up and started listening to us.

*

August 24: As a commenter below notes, and as I learned last night, there is now a release date: November 5, 2013. Guy Fawkes Day is now Stirling Silliphant Day.

Other Naked City posts: GRamercy 7–9166 : GRamercy again : MUrray Hill 7-3933 : Naked Bronx : Naked City Mongol : Nearly plotzing : “Old Rabbit Ears” : Poetry and Naked City : Positively Naked City : TW8-4044 : “WE DELIVER”

W3, another controversy

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is again a source of controversy: Some Say the Spelling of a Winning Word Just Wasn’t Kosher (New York Times).

Other W3 posts
E. B. White on W3 (also starring Dwight Macdonald and David Foster Wallace)
A review of The Story of Ain’t (on W3)

House for sale

“Commissioned in 1926 by Count Stefan de Poniatowski, once heir to the Polish throne, Gloria Crest was later occupied by the screen legend actress Gloria Swanson”: the Gloria Crest estate, in Englewood, New Jersey, is for sale. The asking price: $29 million, down from $39 million, it appears.

I learned about Gloria Crest on vacation last year. My dad did tile work there, after Gloria Swanson’s time.

From Wittgenstein’s Mistress

One more passage from David Markson’s 1988 novel, six pages from the end, from a litany of suffering that sounds like something from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy:

Well, and poor all the young men who died in places like the Hellespont, by which I mean the Dardanelles, and then died again three thousand years after that, likewise.

Even if I hardly mean the same young man.

But meaning poor Hector and poor Patroclus, say, and after that poor Rupert Brooke.

Ah, me. If not to add poor Andrea del Santo and poor Cassandra and poor Marina Tsvetayeva and poor Vincent Van Gogh and poor Jeanne Hébuterne and poor Piero di Cosimo and poor Iphigenia and poor Stan Gehrig and poor singing birds sweet and poor Medea’s little boys and poor Spinoza’s spiders and poor Astyanax and poor my aunt Esther as well.

Well, and poor all the youngsters throwing snowballs in Bruegel, who grew up, and did whatever they did, but never threw snowballs again.

So for that matter poor practically the whole world then, more often than not.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress is unlike any other novel I have read. That alone would not be reason to recommend it. The novel’s strange and baffling premise, its comic timing, its pathos: they clinch the deal.

[Mixed-up names from baseball are a minor element in the novel: Stan Gehrig, Campy Stengel, Sam Usual, Stan Usual. Spinoza liked to watch spiders fight. I’ll leave the rest to your curiosity.]

From Wittgenstein’s Mistress

From David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988). Kate (can she really be called a narrator?) types:

Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover, when I did all of that looking, or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?

Wandering through this endless nothingness. Once in a while, when I was not mad, I would turn poetic instead. I honestly did let myself think about things in such ways.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. For instance I thought about them like that, also.

In a manner of speaking, I thought about them like that.

Actually I underlined that sentence in the book, named the Pensées, when I was in college.

Doubtless I underlined the sentence about wandering through an endless nothingness in somebody else’s book, as well.

And a few pages later:

In spite of frequently underlining sentences in books that had not been assigned, I did well in college, actually.

And later still:

Actually, I did well in college, in spite of frequently underlining sentences in books that had not been assigned.

One is now forced to wonder if underlining sentences in Kierkegaard or Martin Heidegger might have shown more foresight, however.

And why does Kate handle these names as she does?

Incidentally, there is an explanation for my generally speaking of Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard, but of Martin Heidegger as Martin Heidegger.

The explanation being that Kierkegaard’s first name was Søren and in typing that I would repeatedly have to go back to put in the stroke.

I am very keen on Wittgenstein’s Mistress, having made it through 153 of its 240 pages in a day. The novel makes me think of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days (which I hadn’t thought of in years): Kate, like Winnie, is a voice filling a void. And I think of the organization of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and of a Wittgenstein aphorism: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Kate is putting the world together, sentence by sentence by sentence. Trying out and correcting or qualifying or abandoning ideas, she resists solipsism even as she’s stuck in it.

The sources of Kate’s underlined sentences: Blaise Pascal (1623–1662): “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.” Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900): “Irren wir nicht wie durch ein unendliches Nichts” [Do we not now wander through an endless Nothingness?], from Die fröhliche Wissenschaft [The joyful wisdom]. Tyler Malone traces both sentences to Markson’s copy of William Barrett’s Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy.

I once joked that for many years everyone who went to college owned a copy of Barrett’s book. I did, and still do.

I mean, of course, that I still own a copy of the book, not that I am still going to college.

Markson’s books went to the Strand Book Store after his death in 2010.

By which I mean the books that Markson owned, not the books he wrote, although they or some of them could very well have been among the books that he owned.

A copy of Wittgenstein’s Mistress could very well have been among them.

ZIP Code promotional film

“A ZIP Code morning, noon, and night, and everything will be all right.” From the Smithsonian National Postal Museum: ZIP Code, with the Swingin’ Six.

[Given the subject, shouldn't it have been the Swingin’ Five?]