Manson H. Whitlock (1917–2013)

The typewriter repairman Manson H. Whitlock died earlier this week at the age of ninety-six. He was the last of four brothers whose father opened a bookstore in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1899. The store also sold typewriters. Whitlock was working until late June and may have been the world’s oldest typewriter repairman.

At oz.Typewriter, Robert Messenger has assembled, with the help of John Lambert, an extraordinary trove of materials related to Whitlock’s life and work: advertisements, newspaper articles, photographs. They offer glimpses of a gone world, when college students could store their typewriters for their summer: “Storage free if you have your machine cleaned and adjusted at our standard rates.”

Manson Whitlock’s 2010 interview with the Yale Daily News is a delight.

Related posts
Manson H. Whitlock, typewriter repairman
Manson H. Whitlock in the news

Jack DeJohnette in Chicago

Jack DeJohnette
Special Legends Edition Chicago
Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park
Chicago Jazz Festival
August 29, 2013

Roscoe Mitchell, soprano and sopranino
    saxophones, baroque flute, bass recorder
Henry Threadgill, alto saxophone, bass flute
Muhal Richard Abrams, piano
Larry Gray, bass and cello
Jack DeJohnette, percussion

“Chant” (Mitchell)
“Jack Five” (Abrams)
[Unidentified composition]
“The Museum of Time” (DeJohnette)
“Leave, Don’t Go Away” (Threadgill)
[Unidentified composition]

Jack DeJohnette has long been leading groups under the Special Edition name. For this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival, he assembled an Edition with an AACM slant: Muhal Richard Abrams is a co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, established in Chicago in 1965; Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill are both founding members of the group, which might be described as an effort in musical self-determination and self-sufficiency. Last night’s performance was far from what a tradition-minded listener might call “jazz”: the music was often atonal; solos were almost non-existent. The music might be better understood as a set of dialogues and interludes: piano accompanying drums; saxophone accompanying saxophone; one instrument giving way to another. Where was the beat? It was everywhere, pulsing and shifting and changing colors.

The most compelling moments in last night’s music, for me: the two-saxophone intensity and swirling piano of “Chant,” whose repeated scalar figures sounded like calls to prayer or dark omens; the bass flute/bass recorder/cello chamber music of the third, unannounced composition; the Ellington and Mingus overtones and exotica in “The Museum of Time”; and the raucous encore, with Mitchell lifting his soprano almost straight above his head. DeJohnette was endlessly responsive to his fellow musicians. To use an Ellington phrase, he put the pots and pans on, all of them, coloring and commenting with sticks and mallets and even a microphone (held above and below cymbals to produce a raspy hum). But the secret hero of the night was Larry Gray, the one musician without an AACM connection, who is as capable on cello as on bass, and who locked eyes and minds with DeJohnette to create the most solid of foundations. Gray’s authority made me think of Malachi Favors, bassist for the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and that’s as great a compliment as I can offer.

A note on production values: A video screen behind and above musicians evidently makes it impossible for me to pay attention to musicians. I felt like an idiot watching them on the screen, yet there I was, watching the screen. The sad part: one couldn’t not watch the screen, which overpowered the human beings on the stage. It was impossible to look at them without seeing it.

Icing on the last night’s cake — or, really, a second cake: Elaine and I met up with the owner and sole proprietor of Music Clip of the Day for conversation and coffee and tea. He’s added some music to many of my days.

*

January 20, 2015: Made in Chicago, a recording of this perfomance, is scheduled for March 10 release on ECM.

Related reading and viewing
Jack DeJohnette on Muhal Richard Abrams
Jumbotron Jam (Elaine’s take)
Photographs of last night’s concert, by Robert Loerzel

If it’s Friday, this must be Poland

[Mark Trail, August 30, 2013.]

In days to come, Mark will be relieved to learn that it is not a rifle and it is not close. It is a Polish city, many miles from the Lost Forest National Forest.

Related reading
All Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013)

The Irish Times has substantial coverage of the life and work of Seamus Heaney. You might begin here.

Many years ago in Boston, I heard Heaney give a great lecture about poetry and language. I remember it as drawing heavily on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I met Heaney once in the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge and thanked him for that lecture. He was checking on how his books were doing. Just a couple of years ago, I saw a man I thought was Heaney in the Harvard Square Peet’s. He had to be Heaney. I took the chance and said hello, but he wasn’t. The strange thing: whoever this man was, he knew Heaney, as he said, and was editing a Heaney manuscript. On his table, an envelope with Heaney’s return address.

One more thing about The Butler

The presidents are a mixed bag. Kennedy (James Marsden) and Johnson (Liev Schreiber) barely leave an impression. John Cusack is pretty plausible as Nixon in ruins. Alan Rickman is semi-plausible as Reagan. Robin Williams bears a greater resemblance to Truman than to Eisenhower, which made for some confusion in my viewing party.

My choice for Eisenhower: William H. Macy, with the right bald cap.

Related posts
Five things about The Butler
Six more things about The Butler (Musical Assumptions)

Five things about The Butler

Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, and David Oyelowo are brilliant actors. I see three Oscar nominations right there.

I feared a Mr. Holland’s Opus: the backdrop-of-history syndrome. But I had nothing to fear. The man was, after all, working in the White House, and for a long time.

Clarence Williams III (Mod Squad, anyone?) now looks like his grandfather, the pianist and composer Clarence Williams.

The character of Louis Gaines (Oyelowo) owes something to John Lewis, just as Elaine intuited.

The film seems to carry a message for young African-Americans concerning a certain racial epithet. Knowing what Winfrey thinks about that word, I could be seeing things. But I don’t think so.

And one more: We watched the film in a nearly empty theater — two other pale people and us. When Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign became part of the storyline, our fellow moviegoers began to mutter and did not stop. They left right away. We stayed through the credits, as we almost always do.

Elaine has written a post with six more things about The Butler.

[The awkward full title: Lee Daniels’ The Butler.]

A yucky Wednesday on NPR

I winced a little when I heard a guest on the PBS NewsHour address Judy Woodruff and company as “you guys.” And I winced again this morning when I heard David Brancaccio on NPR’s Morning Edition report that air quality in China is better today after “a yucky Wednesday.” Do high levels of pollution count as “yucky”? Maybe in third grade.

Come on, you guys. It’s called diction.

A college exit-exam

More evidence that a degree in itself is not enough:

Next spring, seniors at about 200 U.S. colleges will take a new test that could prove more important to their future than final exams: an SAT-like assessment that aims to cut through grade-point averages and judge students’ real value to employers.

Are You Ready for the Post-College SAT? (Wall Street Journal)

The Collegiate Learning Assessment (the focus of the article and not an SAT-like multiple-choice test) plays an important part in the research that informs Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. The link goes to my review.

*

3:25 p.m.: The link to the WSJ article doesn’t work. What works: search for the article via Google, and you can get to the article from the search results.

Thank you, Bryan Garner

From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day, on “thank you” and responses to it:

“Thank you” remains the best, most serviceable phrase, despite various attempts to embellish it or truncate it: “thanking you in advance” (presumptuous and possibly insulting), “thank you very much” (with a trailer of surplusage), “thanks” (useful on informal occasions), “many thanks” (informal but emphatic), *“much thanks” (archaic and increasingly unidiomatic), *“thanks much” (confusing the noun with the verb), and *“thanx” (unacceptably cutesy).

I prefer “thank you.” My favorite embellishment, for use on the telephone when appropriate: “Thank you, you’ve been really helpful.” More:

The traditional response to “Thank you” is “You’re welcome.” Somehow, though, in the 1980s, “You’re welcome” came to feel a little stiff and formal, perhaps even condescending (as if the speaker were saying, “Yes, I really did do you a favor, didn’t I?”). As a result, two other responses started displacing “You’re welcome”: (1) “No problem” (as if the speaker were saying, “Don’t worry, you didn’t inconvenience me too much”); and (2) “No, thank you” (as if the person doing the favor really considered the other person to have done the favor). The currency of “You’re welcome” seems to diminish little by little, but steadily. Old-fashioned speakers continue to use it, but its future doesn’t look bright.

Suddenly I am an old-fashioned speaker.

What do you say when someone says “thank you”?

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone. The Garner asterisk marks an “invariably inferior form.”]

August 28, 1963