Herb Jeffries (1913–2014)

The actor and singer Herb Jeffries has died. From the New York Time obituary: “I just knew that my life would be more interesting as a black guy. If I’d chosen to live my life passing as white, I’d have never been able to sing with Duke Ellington.”

I believe that Herb Jeffries was the last link to the 1940s Ellington band.

Jeffries’s recordings with Ellington, via YouTube and Grooveshark
“The Brown-Skin Gal in the Calico Gown” : “Flamingo” : “The Girl in My Dreams Tries to Look like You” : “I Never Felt This Way Before” : “Jump for Joy” : “My Little Brown Book” : “There Shall Be No Night” : “What Good Would It Do?” : “You, You Darlin’”

[If you’re picking three: “Flamingo,” “I Never Felt This Way Before,” and “Jump for Joy.” But I also have inordinate affection for “There Shall Be No Night.”]

*

May 27: I’ve corrected the link for “Jump for Joy”: I had the Ivie Anderson version.

Memorial Day

[“Arlington Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia. A girl watching Colonel Hammond lay the President’s wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Memorial Day.” Photograph by Esther Bubley. May 1943. From the Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]

Gilbert Sorrentino, Irish and Italian

Gilbert Sorrentino, in an essay about his Irish and Italian inheritance:

I end with two stories . . . . The first concerns the man who goes into an Italian cobbler’s shop with a pair of shoes to be heeled. He makes it clear that he must have the shoes that same evening, and that if the cobbler can’t do the job, he won’t leave the shoes. The cobbler swears that the shoes will be ready. That evening, the man returns to find that the shoes are not ready, and, exasperated, he asks the cobbler why he swore to him that they would be. The cobbler replies: “Telling you that they’d be ready, even when I knew they wouldn’t, made you happy all day.”

The second is the joke about the Irishman who comes home to his wife drunk every night. A priest tells her that she should throw a good scare into her husband to cure him, and that night, when he arrives at the door, his wife appears in a sheet, and screams at him: “I am the Devil, come to take you to hell!” The drunk looks at this figure, and after a moment, says, “I’m pleased to meet you. . . . I married your sister!” That this latter touches on the strange Irish affinity for the heresy of Manichaeism is another story.

“Genetic Coding,” in Something Said: Essays (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984).

Other Sorrentino posts
Bandbox
From Gilbert Sorrentino’s final work
Gilbert Sorrentino (1929-2006)

I can’t get no satisfaction

To be able to be satisfied with little is not a failing, it is a blessing — if, at any rate, what you seek is satisfaction. And if you seek something other than satisfaction, I would inquire (with astonishment) into what it is that you find more desirable than satisfaction. What, I would ask, could possibly be worth sacrificing satisfaction in order to obtain?

William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Related reading
Stoic-colored glasses (Another excerpt)
William B. Irvine’s website

Stoic-colored glasses

We normally characterize an optimist as someone who sees his glass as being half full rather than half empty. For a Stoic, though, this degree of optimism would only be a starting point. After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass: It could, after all, have been broken or stolen. And if he is atop his Stoic game, he might go on to comment about what an astonishing thing glass vessels are: They are cheap and fairly durable, impart no taste to what we put in them, and — miracle of miracles! — allow us to see what they contain. This might sound a bit silly, but to someone who has not lost his capacity for joy, the world is a wonderful place. To such a person, glasses are amazing: to everyone else, a glass is just a glass, and it is half empty to boot.

William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

A terrific book. Reading it, I realize that for years now I’ve been thinking (at least sometimes) along Stoic lines.

Related reading
I can’t get no satisfaction (Another excerpt)
William B. Irvine’s website

Domestic comedy

“I saw that look in your hands.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[The subject was pistachios.]

”How about some good hot coffee?”

[Life, November 15, 1954.]

This advertisement supposes an attentive audience, prepared to read every word. Did it work? It works with me. I am helpless before it. I surrender, gladly, and identify, if only for a moment, with that railroad man. I, too, welcome the question “How about some good hot coffee?” — with or without italics. I, too, welcome a “Coffee-break” — with or without a capital C, with or without quotation marks.

According to the Wikipedia article Break (work), the Pan-American Coffee Bureau was instrumental in popularizing the term coffee-break . Life has several 1952 advertisements with the Bureau’s full-length slogan, “Give yourself a coffee-break . . . and get what coffee gives to you.” Here’s one. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the term to 1951. Time (March 5, 1951): “Since the war, the coffee break has been written into union contracts.”

120 Wall Street was and is a skyscraper.

I am still peering ahead, as if looking for signals.

Related reading
Coffee and repetition (Submitted for Your Perusal)
All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

Nancy Malone and The Times

The New York Times at last has an obituary for Nancy Malone. The Los Angeles Times still promises that “a complete obituary” is forthcoming.

I read the Times obituary this morning and, ever curious, searched my stats. Yes, The Times uses highly specialized twenty-first-century research tools:


[May 13, 2014, at 6:22 in the evening.]

If the Times obituary borrows anything from Orange Crate Art, it’s a mistake. When I posted an image of Malone’s 1946 Life cover (bright and early on May 13), I wrote that Malone is “not identified by name.” I came to that mistaken conclusion by looking at the issue’s photo credits. Had I looked more thoroughly, I would have seen a description of the cover on page 3:


[“Nancy Maloney of Long Island, shown on cover holding first issue of LIFE, is one of the most successful younger Powers models.” Not a mistake: she was born Maloney.]

The Times obituary describes Malone on the cover of Life as “an anonymous girl-next-door in pigtails.” True, there’s no name on the cover, but the magazine does identify Malone by name. A Times reporter or researcher might have made the same mistake I made by looking at the cover alone. But turning the pages of the magazine (or the virtual pages, at Google Books) would fix things. I think it likely that the Times borrowed a mistaken detail from me. That’s what can happen when you trust the Internets.

Mark Trail revised

[Mark Trail, May 15, 2014.]

Yes, Old Rex, “the grizzly bear that lives near Cutter’s Bluff,” has entered the scene. Rex will, I assume, save Mark Trail from the other (enraged) bear that has pursued him for many days now. Looking at the expression on Mark’s face, though, I imagine a different scene, one in which Cherry Trail has finally begun to speak frankly of her, uhh, needs.


[Mark Trail revised, May 15, 2014.]

You can read Mark Trail every day at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other fine news outlets.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

WindowMizer

Some years ago, the app WindowShade X made it possible to roll up a Mac window, so to speak, leaving nothing but a title bar. That’s tremendously useful to anyone working on a small screen. I began using this app not long after switching to a Mac in 2007.

As OS X evolved, WindowShade X stopped working. But the app has a worthy successor: RGB World’s WindowMizer (for OS X 10.6 and higher). WindowMizer has many options, among which is an option to hide its Dock icon (seen to the left) — that’s handy with an app that is always on. (Always on at least on my Macs.)

WindowMizer is not free and not exactly cheap: a $14.99 license allows installation on two machines. Given the app’s usefulness, the price is a bargain. And the app’s developer, Chris Kassa, stands by his work. E-mail him with a question or problem, as I did yesterday, and he’ll give you a friendly, helpful response. My problem: I was trying to install an old version of the app, not the more recent version for which I have a license. Chris figured that out, not me.

Before there was WindowMizer, before there was WindowShade X, and before there was OS X, there was WindowShade, built into the Mac operating system. A post at RGB World tells the story: History of WindowShade.


[A Chrome window, rolled up with WindowMizer.]