The Old Reader, about to disappear

The Old Reader, one of the more appealing substitutes for Google Reader, is closing the doors to most users. Details and further explanation here.

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July 31: “We have received a number of proposals that we are discussing right now. Chances are high that public The Old Reader will live after all.”

A banner in TOR announced the service’s imminent closing. It would have been helpful to see this new development in a banner as well. Instead, the news appears as an update on TOR’s blog. The Old Reader is an amateur effort, in the best and worst ways.

Earl “Fatha” Hines on film

At Vimeo: Earl “Fatha” Hines, a 1975 documentary filmed at Blues Alley in Washington, D. C. This film is a great depiction of a musician off the bandstand, playing and talking in the afternoon hours before a night’s performance. I waited years to see this film again.

[Why “Fatha”? Because Earl Hines is considered the father of modern jazz piano. I have fifty-one Hines LPs.]

A Route 66 mystery guest

Can you identify this actress? Leave your best guess in the comments.

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8:58 a.m.: The answer’s now in the comments.

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A Route 66 mystery guest
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All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

Happy birthday, Dad

I went out to look for a birthday card for my dad a few weeks ago and came away empty-handed. The not-from-a-kid son-to-father cards ran to beer, cuss words, hammocks, and bad poetry, none of which fit my dad. So I made a card: I found a hexagonal grid online, sized and printed it, and turned it into a tile floor with an 85 set in hexagons. Something like this, old-school.

My dad turns 85, or eighty-five, today. He worked as a tileman in northern New Jersey, Leddy Ceramic Tile, and he’s made many beautiful cards for birthdays and holidays. Thus my card, a second-generation effort.

Happy birthday, Dad.

Some art by James Leddy
Abe’s shades : Boo! : Happy holidays : Hardy mums : Thanks!

[The cuss card offered thanks for teaching the card-giver to talk like the card-recipient. Sheesh. I like to spell numbers up to one hundred, but not on a tile floor, not even a virtual tile floor. My wife Elaine thinks that “I like to spell numbers” means that I have a strange hobby, so I’ll rephrase: I prefer to write out numbers up to one hundred.]

VDP on NPR

Van Dyke Parks interviewed on NPR: Van Dyke Parks Lights Up Songs from Inside.

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All Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)

A bookstore opening and closing

J. L. Sathre, January 2012: 25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore.

J. L. Sathre, May 2013: 25 Things I’m Learning From Closing a Bookstore.

The store had a seven-year run.

Chris Matthews on sex

Chris Matthews, in an MSNBC Hardball discussion of the Anthony Weiner scandal, June 17, 2011:

“Sex is generally between two people in private, you know, in some room somewhere.”

Chris Matthews, in an MSNBC Hardball discussion of the Anthony Weiner scandal, July 25, 2013:

“This isn’t meeting in some hotel somewhere with somebody you’ve known a while or anything like that.”

The first rule of sex: Get a room!

You can watch yesterday’s discussion here, or somewhere.

[It’s fun watching Chris Matthews attempt to talk about sex, and there should be more opportunities in the days ahead.]

SMITH BUILDING

[A store entryway, somewhere in downstate Illinois. Click for a larger view.]

Words from hexagons: a beautiful feature of the dowdy world.

I once lived in a Boston apartment building with “THE GRESHAM” tiled into the entryway floor. How come I never took a photograph?

Another tile-centric post
96th and Lexington

[Dad, I saw this floor after I made your card.]

“What once seemed ours forever”

From J. L. Carr’s 1980 novella A Month in the Country :

We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours forever — the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

A Month in the Country is best read in summer, especially when fall begins to loom — as I suppose it always does.

Another passage from A Month in the Country
“Creatures of hope”

[The novella has been reissued by New York Review Books (2000).]

WCW for young readers

When my children were younger, we found a reliable source of family fun in William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Make up substitutes for the nouns — oh, say, dinosaur, poop, umbrellas — and you too can play.

Too late for my family to make use of, A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams, by Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2008), is the work of a writer and an artist with a genuine feeling for Williams’s work. Bryant presents Willie Williams as a boy strongly attuned to the natural world, who looks, listens, writes, and abandons lofty poeticality for the language of everyday things. The book’s pages are often beautifully collaged, though nothing is said about Williams’s interest in visual art. One disappointment: Williams’s mature poetry is presented as the work of the boy Willie, a choice that takes us (no doubt unintentionally) too close to my-kid-could-have-written-that territory. Then again, thinking that a kid wrote those poems might be all some other kid needs to feel inspired about writing.

This book would make a wonderful gift for a young reader.

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All Willam Carlos Williams posts (Pinboard)