Joe Wilder (1922–2014)

The trumpeter Joe Wilder has died at the age of ninety-two. The New York Times has an obituary.

My fambly was fortunate to hear Joe Wilder playing an all-Ellington program with the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra many years ago. His solos were the brightest moments of the night. Kids, you got to hear a master at work.

The January 6, 1986 issue of The New Yorker has a Whitney Balliett piece on Joe Wilder (titled “Joe Wilder”). It’s mostly Wilder talking. Here he describes his idea of improvisation:

“The melodic material determines to a great degree what I do. If it is simple material, I try and make it more ornate. If it is ornate, I try and simplify it. You try not to trample on a nice melody. You alter it here and there.”

You can listen to Joe Wilder’s alterations via these YouTube samples.

“Cherokee” : “Have You Met Miss Jones?” : “In a Mist” : “Prelude to a Kiss” : “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue”

[Can a trumpet sound like Johnny Hodges playing “Prelude to a Kiss”? Yes, if that trumpet is being played by Joe Wilder.]

Elizabeth T. Walker speaks

Here’s a lengthy 2014 conversation between the pianist Frank Pavese and the actress Elizabeth T. Walker, aka Tippy Walker, who played Valerie Campbell Boyd in the 1964 film The World of Henry Orient (dir. George Roy Hill). This conversation seems to have come online with no fanfare and to little notice. My favorite Walker observation therein: “It’s very hard to be yourself, but it’s the best possible thing.”

This 2012 piece from The New Yorker website describes Walker’s difficult post-Orient life: A Star Is Born, Lost, and Found. I hope that there are good things coming Elizabeth T. Walker’s way.

I’ve been a fan of The World of Henry Orient since kidhood and finally read Nora Johnson’s 1958 novel a few years ago. Here’s an excerpt.

IBM in Naked City?

A reader writes:

Naked City shot one episode in an IBM office. My [late] father was working there at the time, and said that a girl ran down the hallway and all the IBMers were instructed to open their office doors and look out. Would you be able to tell me which episode this might be?

My correspondent thinks that the episode aired in May or June of 1961, ’62, or ’63.

I think the episode might be “The Multiplicity of Herbert Konish,” which aired on May 23, 1962. It's the only episode I can recall offhand in which office life is prominent. (It also happens to be one of my favorite episodes.) But no one runs in this episode, and there’s no one looking out from an office doorway. As my correspondent notes, such a scene may have been filmed and left unused.

Naked City viewers: is another episode more likely? Adair, can you help here?

Another way at the question: does anyone recognize IBM in these scenes?


[Detective Adam Flint (Paul Burke) on the premises. The name on the door may be a fiction: I can find no trace of it.]


[David Wayne as Herbert Konish, pressing Down.]


[William LeMassena as Mr. Hanley, looking up an account in a Rolodex. Click any image for a larger view.]

The IMDb page for this episode has only Biograph Studios (in the Bronx) as a location. But these interiors do not look like sets. And Washington Square Park is conspicuous in this episode, so plainly the page is incomplete. As you may have already guessed, I haven’t found interior images of IBM offices circa 1960.

“The Multiplicity of Herbert Konish” is the subject of one, two, three previous OCA posts.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

Impressionist France

At the St. Louis Art Museum, through July 6, Impressionist France: Visions of Nation from Le Gray to Monet. The exhibit explores the role of nineteenth-century painters and photographers in the construction of French identity. Five things I was surprised to learn:

A state-funded project employed five photographers (including Gustave Le Gray) to document French monuments in need of conservation.

Another photographer, Charles Marville, photographed old Parisian streets and buildings before they were demolished in Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s project of urban renewal.

Le Gray and Marville were both official photographers; Le Gray for France, Marville for Paris. All very WPA-like in my achronological head.

French rural life has long been associated with the idea of la France profonde, “deep France,” ancient and unchanged.

The paint tube transformed the possibilities of painting. The painter John Goffe Rand invented the tube in 1841. It made paint easily portable, allowing painters to work en plein air. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: “Without colors in tubes, there would be no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no Impressionism.”

Here’s more about paint tubes, from Smithsonian Magazine: “Never Underestimate the Power of a Paint Tube.” (This article is the source of the Renoir sentence above.) And here, from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, is Rand’s patent, “Improvement in the Construction of Vessels or Apparatus for Preserving Paint, & c.”

[Is there even one American city with an official photographer?]

Old Blue

[Bearded Bull’s Head. Sumerian, Early Dynastic III Period, 2600–2450 BCE. Copper with lapis lazuli and shell inlay. Saint Louis Art Museum.]

The museum card says,

This bull’s head is made from solid copper, an extremely costly and valuable material in antiquity. It was likely part of an architectural element, such as a lintel over door, since it is too heavy to be a furniture embellishment. The bull was commonly associated with a storm god, whose control of weather and thunder was imagined as a great bull roaring across the sky. As an embodiment of power and fertility, the bearded bull served as a symbol of divine protection and royal might throughout ancient Near Eastern art.

Mighty, yes. But such a plaintive face! I think of Blake’s tyger: mighty, but.

You can see this bull on the Museum’s website. He’s much bluer in person.

[About the post title: see here, listen here.]

“WTF!!”

Alas, grammar! Grammar blog about capitalizing titles DOESN'T capitalize its titles!! WTF!! http://t.co/XAZ3jqKlYe pic.twitter.com/KTNMxQnuQA

— John Wohn (@johnwohn) May 6, 2014

“WTF!!” indeed. If the tweeter had read more attentively, he might have noticed the sentence that concludes the post: “I know my parts of speech, but I like the modesty of sentence-style titles for Orange Crate Art posts.” See? I’m not as dumb as I look, or as I look to some people.

The related post
How to capitalize a title

Testers

 

I wish I knew where these slips originated: they just appeared on the bedroom floor the other day. I like the care that went into their design. Four languages, two to a side, 1 5/8" x 2 1/8".

A related post
Inspected With Pride By Betty Tingle

Hundred-Dollar General

I would respectfully suggest that if there’s one place not to pass a counterfeit hundred-dollar bill, it would be a Dollar General store. Your large bill will look wildly out of proportion to any plausible purchase and more than a little suspicious.

[Or at least that would be the case if I were cashiering.]

How to capitalize a title

I like doing these things by hand, but here’s a useful service for the careful writer: TitleCapitalization. Type in your title, and it’s capitalized for you.

This service might not satisfy the super-careful writer. Here are TitleCapitalization’s rules, presented as a paraphrase of The Chicago Manual of Style (8.157):

1. Capitalize the first and the last word.
2. Capitalize nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and subordinate conjunctions.
3. Lowercase articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions.
4. Lowercase the “to” in an infinitive (I want to play guitar).

The Chicago rules are a bit more complicated:

1. Capitalize the first and last words in titles and subtitles (but see rule 7), and capitalize all other major words (nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and some conjunctions—but see rule 4).
2. Lowercase the articles the , a , and an .
3. Lowercase prepositions, regardless of length, except when they are used ad­verbially or adjectivally (up in Look Up , down in Turn Down , on in The On But­ton , to in Come To , etc.) or when they compose part of a Latin expression used adjectivally or adverbially (De Facto , In Vitro , etc.).
4. Lowercase the conjunctions and , but , for , or , and nor .
5. Lowercase to not only as a preposition (rule 3) but also as part of an infinitive (to Run , to Hide , etc.), and lowercase as in any grammatical function.
6. Lowercase the part of a proper name that would be lowercased in text, such as de or von .
7. Lowercase the second part of a species name, such as fulvescens in Acipenser fulvescens , even if it is the last word in a title or subtitle.

Did I say a bit ? And then there are the rules for hyphenated compounds.

TitleCapitalization won’t solve every title problem (Turn Down , Acipenser fulvescens , E-flat ), but it would go a long way toward getting a title right. It’s saddens me to realize that even the basics of capitalizing a title call for an understanding of grammar (the parts of speech and the functions of words) that most twenty-first-century college students lack.

I found TitleCapitalization by reading Daughter Number Three.

[I know my parts of speech, but I like the modesty of sentence-style titles for Orange Crate Art posts.]

*

May 9: John Wohn’s Twitter reaction to this post — “Alas, grammar! Grammar blog about capitalizing titles DOESN’T capitalize its titles!! WTF!!” — might have been forestalled had Wohn read the sentence in brackets just above. It’s always been there. WTF indeed.

Finals time again

As finals near: How to do well on a final examination. I wrote this post in 2005 because I was unable to find anything like it online. It offers practical advice for keeping calm and carrying on, all of which remains sound. There’s also some anti-advice, from 2007: How to do horribly on a final exam. My students tell me that Grey’s Anatomy is still on television, which means that all (three) pop-culture references in the “horribly” post remain timely.