Illinois budget crisis on The Daily Show

Last night The Daily Show had a six-minute story about the Illinois budget crisis. Spoiler alert: there is no happy ending.

Tomorrow will mark a year without a state budget. The damage already done to social services and public higher education is vast, and the damage will continue for years. One example: lower Fall 2016 enrollments for Illinois state colleges, as students choose to study elsewhere.

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

Duke Ellington and Paul Gonsalves, “Happy Reunion”

The news of a play about the tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, Arthur Luby’s Paul Gonsalves on the Road , led me to this videotaped performance:



“Happy Reunion” was a frequent concert feature for Gonsalves in the Ellington band’s later years. This performance (July 21, 1972) is from Ellington’s weeklong residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (July 17–21).

The story behind this performance, as I can piece it together: Gonsalves, who had a long history of alcohol and drug abuse, had been in bad shape (and perhaps late) for a Madison performance or rehearsal with the full band. The usual Ellington strategy with a wayward musician on stage was to call upon him for solo after solo. Or to look the other way: there’s footage of a mid-1960s Ellington performance with Gonsalves asleep on the bandstand, holding his saxophone in playing position as Ellington pretends not to notice. In Madison, Ellington released his wrath at Gonsalves in the form of choice words. I can’t imagine that happening in a concert setting. My hunch is that it happened at an open rehearsal. Gonsalves must have felt humiliated.

This performance came the next afternoon. Gonsalves seems to show up unannounced, as Ellington is answering a question from the audience. Listen closely for the question Ellington puts to Gonsalves at the start: “Stinky, you juiced again?” And Gonsalves, before playing: “Which way is Madison?” And afterward, at Gonsalves’s request, four kisses, an Ellington specialty (one for each cheek). A happy reunion, it seems. Was all forgiven? I think so.

Paul Gonsalves was a brilliant musician, and much more than the blues-wailing hero of the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. His influence can be heard quite clearly in fellow tenor David Murray, whose big band has performed an orchestrated version of Gonsalves’s 1956 solo on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” titled — what else? — “Paul Gonsalves.”

Wisconsin, let us see all your Ellington footage.

July 2022: You can now hear “Happy Reunion” here. Ellington appears at 32:54. Gonsalves arrives, apparently unannounced, at 58:58.



Related reading
The Paul Gonsalves Pages (a fan’s website)
All OCA Duke Ellington posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve pieced together what seems to have happened from two sources: this one and this one. My favorite “Happy Reunion” is the 1971 performance from The London Concert (United Artists, 1972). The two-LP set has been reissued on CD as The Togo Brava Suite .]

Books and records v. things

Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

Books and records: Rosemary and Greg are my people.

I think it’s time for a Beverly Cleary tag.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

Museums, uh-oh

Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

Museums: always a dangerous sign.

Sister of the Bride is my favorite novel in Beverly Cleary’s “First Love” series. The Luckiest Girl is in second place, followed by Fifteen and Jean and Johnny . I find that I can best enjoy these books by not thinking at all about my experience of high school. Wait, what’s a “high school”? Did I even attend one? I make no comparisons.

Sister of the Bride has many wonderful moments of gentle social satire. It’s in many ways a mid-century Bay Area version of Jane Austen. But: Rosemary MacLane and Greg Aldredge, students at UC Berkeley, are, as the novel makes clear, at least a tad counter-cultural. One more school year and they can participate in the Free Speech Movement as a nice, young married couple.

Related reading
Dowdy-world miracle (from Fifteen )
If my life were a Beverly Cleary novel
Jean Jarrett, dictionary user
Jean Jarrett, letter writer
Ramona Quimby and cursive
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan
Time, cyclical and linear (from Ellen Tebbits)

Six sonnets from NPR

From All Things Considered , six sonnets for your consideration: “Human or Machine: Can You Tell Who Wrote These Poems?” I guessed five of six correctly. The lines I liked best:

A thousand pictures on the kitchen floor,
Talked about a hundred years or more.

If my life were a Beverly Cleary novel

Related reading
Dowdy-world miracle (from Fifteen )
Jean Jarrett, dictionary user
Jean Jarrett, letter writer
Ramona Quimby and cursive
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan
Time, cyclical and linear (from Ellen Tebbits)

[Things missing: an alarm clock, a walk before breakfast to beat the heat, the heat, the humidity, &c. “When he could have”: I don’t think Beverly Cleary would use singular they . The novel would explain somewhere in chapter 1 that Elaine and I both kept our maiden names when we married.]

Bill Cunningham (1929–2016)

“Money’s the cheapest thing. Liberty and freedom is the most expensive”: the photographer Bill Cunningham, as quoted in the New York Times obituary.

I like these related words from the great documentary Bill Cunningham New York (dir. Richard Press, 2011):

“You see, if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid. That’s the key to the whole thing. Don’t touch money: it’s the worst thing you can do.”

A related post
Bill Cunningham New York

Overheard

[In the supermarket .]

“Apparently he gets hungry on beer.”

Does the speaker mean 1. that this fellow gets hungry when he drinks beer, or 2. that he gets hungry for beer?

The Internets return only one result for “hungry on beer,” a page from a food lover in Delhi NCR, who says in a restaurant review that he could not taste his food because he was “pretty hungry on beer (I think no one can go wrong in serving a beer).” I think that he means that he was more interested in the beer than the food. The restaurant’s name: Beeryani. Groan. (If you’re puzzled, see here.)

If “hungry on beer” is an Indian idiom, I think it would be better represented online. The person I overheard in the supermarket is an indigenous east-central Illinoisan, no question. So I will leave “hungry on beer” to stand as a small intercontinental mystery.

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Back to school

I am living in Brighton, Massachusetts, as my own grown-up self, and attending Brookline High School. I board the T and ride down Commonwealth Avenue. As we approach the Harvard Avenue intersection, I see heavy traffic. I get out right before Harvard and walk, thinking I can get back on the trolley after the traffic clears. Logic, right? Sometimes a pedestrian can outpace a traffic jam. I dodge cars at the intersection like William Shatner in the Twilight Zone episode “Nick of Time”.

And then I stop into a bookstore, not Brookline Booksmith but a bookstore in a bright and airy old house with white walls. I find two hardcover books to buy. Their dust jackets remind me of E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World: serif typefaces in black and red on white. I’m supposed to be at the high school at 9:00. The clock says 10:00, but I’m not worried, because I know they haven’t turned it back yet. At the front desk I talk with the owner about my having lived in Brookline in the 1980s. As we talk I realize that I have no idea where the high school is. But I’m not worried.

This is the fifth school-related dream I’ve had since retiring from teaching, and the second in which I’ve been a student. And here, I admit, not a very good student.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

From the Saturday Stumper

A wonderfully clever clue from today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, 4-Down, seven letters: “Maker of belt loops.” No spoilers: the answer is in the comments.

Today’s puzzle is by Brad Wilber, whose Saturday Newsday work is the subject of an earlier OCA post. Finishing the Saturday Stumper is always cause for minor self-congratulation.