Minor bill-paying wisdom

Twice in recent months I’ve forgotten to sign my name to the checks that pay our water bill. I have a good excuse though: the feeling of accomplishment I get from writing our account number on the check’s memo line obliterates all thoughts of further writing. You should know that our account number is a twelve-digit string of 0s, 1s, and 2s. Our water department appears to keep its accounts in base three.

But I digress. Here is the minor wisdom:

When you need to write a check, sign first. That way you’ll never get a call from the water department, or any other department, because your check needs signed.

Reader, is there any minor bill-paying wisdom that you would like to share?

A related post
Minor kitchen wisdom (from me and from readers)

[“Need + past participle” is a regionalism I like.]

Route 66 de Chirico

[From the Route 66 episode “Same Picture, Different Frame,” October 4, 1963.]

Jack Marta, director of photography for ninety episodes of the Route 66, was an ace. Take a look at his IMDb page and you’ll see a career that ran from 1926 to 1980.

Here, for a fleeting moment at the beginning of an episode, is an arresting composition that could have been painted by Giorgio de Chirico.

Related reading
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

Thomas Jefferson’s PDA

“Thought you’d like this,” says my son Ben: Jefferson’s Portable Ivory Notebooks. I do. Thanks, Ben.

The Jefferson notebook attracted a flurry of interest in 2005, during the salad days of the hipster PDA. Everything old is new again, and again.

A related post
Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting

[You can buy a brass and ivory notebook here. The pages look like piano keys. Ouch.]

Casting By

Tonight on HBO, Casting By (dir. Tom Donahue, 2012), a documentary film about casting directors. A CNN article describes the film as giving considerable attention to Marion Dougherty, who early in her career cast many episodes of Naked City and Route 66.

As I just learned from The New York Times, it was Dougherty who recommended Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton for All in the Family. What the Times doesn’t mention is that both O’Connor and Stapleton appeared in episodes of Naked City (though not the same episodes); Stapleton was also in an episode of Route 66.

You can watch the film’s trailer online.

Related reading
All Naked City posts (Pinboard)
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

[As regular readers of Orange Crate Art know, Naked City and Route 66 have become matters of mildly obsessive interest in my household.]

Tom Hanks types

In The New York Times, Tom Hanks writes about life in the dowdy world of typing: “I use a manual typewriter — and the United States Postal Service — almost every day.”

On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

[“Jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, posing for adult art students.” Photograph by Gordon Parks. Castle Hill, Massachusetts, July 1955. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.

WKCR-FM is playing Armstrong all day.

Related reading
All Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)

Cool jazz pioneer?

Today’s New York Times crossword puzzle, by Brad Wilber and Doug Peterson, serves in a small way to rewrite music history. The clue for 46-Down: “Cool jazz pioneer.” The answer: TORME.

No, he wasn’t.

The basis for this clue appears to be a paragraph from the Times obituary for Mel Tormé:

But it was as a singer that Mr. Torme made his deepest mark. The critic Will Friedwald, in his book Jazz Singing, cited Mr. Torme as a pioneer of “cool jazz,” spun off from the pop crooning of the day.

Here is what Friedwald wrote:


[Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices From Bessie Smith To Bebop And Beyond (1996).]

What Friedwald says in this passage is not that Tormé was a pioneer of cool jazz, but that his singing reflected that music. Indeed, Friedwald describes the so-called vo-cool style as coming into its own as “cool instrumental jazz,” or what most listeners would call cool jazz, began to fade in popularity.

I ran the clue for 46-Down (minus the rest of the puzzle) past my dad, who defers to no one in his love of Tormé’s music. His guess: YOUNG, as in Lester. I would have guessed DAVIS, as in Miles. As for the characterization of Tormé as a cool jazz pioneer, my dad calls it “a stretch.” Perhaps the characterization results from someone’s attempt to create a novel clue, something other than “Crooner Mel” or “Melodious Mel” or “The Velvet Fog,” all of which have appeared in Times puzzles. Mel Tormé was a terrific singer, and he’s always crossword-worthy. But he wasn’t a pioneer of cool jazz.

*

Here’s what happened when I wrote to the Times.

Related posts
All crossword posts (Pinboard)
A Mel Tormé story
Tracts, tides, and drunks

[You can search for the history of a word or clue at XWord Info.]

Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity

Worth at least a three-hour drive: Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, at the Art Institute of Chicago. This exhibition gives us art devoted not to cathedrals, haystacks, and water lilies, but to well-dressed men and women (mostly women). Clothes in these works seem to both mask and reveal the human subject: one is what one wears. The studio portrait gives way to what appears to be a moment of everyday life (titles often carry a year): someone is reading a newspaper, someone is trying on a hat.

For Elaine and for me, the great discovery of this exhibition is James Tissot. His work seems more Pre-Raphaelite than Impressionist. I wish I had realized while still in the museum that Tissot’s The Circle of the Rue Royale depicts Charles Haas, the model for Proust’s Swann:

And yet, dear Charles Swann, whom I knew so little when I was still so young and you so near the grave, it is already because someone whom you must have considered a little idiot has made you the hero of one of his novels that people are beginning to talk about you again, and perhaps you will live on. If people talk so much about the Tissot painting set on the balcony of the Rue Royale Club, where you are standing with Galliffet, Edmond de Polignac and Saint-Maurice, it is because they can see there is something of you in the character of Swann.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003)

The perfect adjunct to the big show: Undressed: The Fashion of Privacy. Both exhibitions run through September 29.

[The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a gallery-by-gallery tour.]

Some rocks, some rocks

[“How to Keep Cool,” Zippy, August 2, 2013.]

I went a little crazy when I saw the middle panel of today’s Zippy. Because here is what I was planning to post today:


[From the Lassie episode “Rock Hound,” April 5, 1959. Lassie and Boomer Bates’s dog Mike visit a strangely similar memorial.]

If you’re wondering about “some rocks,” it’s a reference to the comic strip Nancy. Scott McCloud explains it, or them.

Please visualize these links in the form of a Venn diagram:

Nancy posts
Nancy and Zippy posts (with more rocks)
Zippy posts

[What is Zippy eschewing? His “usual styrofoam footwear.”]

Fragments from a musical

A little-known fact of musical-theater history: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music started as a very different show, What Is the Sound of Music?

From the surviving manuscripts, in black pencil and blue ink on lined yellow 8 1/2" x 11" paper:

A Buddhist nun is torn between her dedication to the liberation of all sentient beings and her love for a wealthy landowner whose family [illegible ] as a governess.

[This sentence appears to be a synopsis of the story.]

*

“What Is the Sound of Music?”
“This Acolyte’s a Problem in the Sangha”
“How Do You Solve a Problem Like Samsara?”
“The Lonely Lama”
“Climb Ev’ry Mountain in the Quest for
    Enlightenment”
“Old Advice”
“Worldly Vice, Worldly Vice, Every Morning You
    Greet Me”
“Do-Re-Mi”

[From what appears to be a list of working song titles. Three of the titles are struck through.]

*

Totally unprepared are you to face a world of Zen,
Timid and shy and scared are you of koans beyond
    your ken.

[Partial lyric, “Sixteen Going on Seventeen Days of Unceasing Meditation”]

*

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens,
Brown paper packages tied up with strings,
All are but fleeting, impermanent things.

[Partial lyric, “My Favorite Things Are All Utterly Impermanent”]

Perhaps you too, reader, have come across one or more manuscript fragments. Please, share your discovery in a comment.

[No disrespect to any tradition intended. It’s just fun.]