Orange fabric art

Our friend Jean Petree, who introduced Elaine and me almost thirty-three years ago (is that possible?), drew a doodle, turned it into a print, and voilà: fabric for a dress, straight to our mailbox. Elaine will sew and wear the dress. I will admire her in it.

There must be color, even on a dark day. Thank you, Jean.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange art turtle : Orange batik art : Orange bookmark art : Orange car art : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange dress art : Orange enamel art : Orange flag art : Orange light art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange parking art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange soda-label art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

About last night

Elaine and I went to sleep, of a sort, at midnight. We couldn’t bear to stay up for the inevitable news. I woke up at two-something and remembered what Lee Hays said at the Weavers’ farewell concert, November 28, 1980, not long after the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency:

“We’ve been around long enough to tell you: be of good cheer. This, too, will pass. I’ve had kidney stones, and I know.”

And then I thought of Edvard Munch’s The Scream , and then I somehow fell asleep for another hour.

The New York Times this morning:

Donald John Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States on Tuesday in a stunning culmination of an explosive, populist and polarizing campaign that took relentless aim at the institutions and long-held ideals of American democracy.

Without institutions and ideals you don’t have much of a democracy, or much of a culture. Donald Trump’s Improv Tour has revealed his contempt for the rule of law and for the house we live in, which holds countless varieties of human identity, ability, and purpose. As head birther, he had already long revealed his contempt for fact. Without fact, you don’t have much of a reality other than that which those in power declare: 2 + 2 = 5. Trump is by all indications incapable of a day’s worth of sustained attention to the work of the presidency, much less four-years’ worth. And yet he was elected.

I have long thought of 1968 as the darkest year of my small chunk of American history. But now that year is 2016.

Four related posts
Duce redux
Dunning K. Trump
Eyes on the plane
Kristol, Palin, Trump

Fifty blog-description lines

Google’s Blogger calls the line that sits below a blog title the “blog description line.” I’ve added a finicky hyphen. For a long time, I had the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s “Orange Crate Art” as my blog-description line: “Orange crate art was a place to start.” In May 2010, I began to vary the line, using some word, phrase, or sentence from a recent post. And I began keeping track. I like looking at these bits of found language. Oh, the things you miss if you’re reading the RSS feed.

Here are the last fifty lines, running from July 2015 to this morning:

“Embedded in a rectangle of snow”
“Definitely feelin’ the summer vibe”
“On hiatus”
“Thanks”
“Having boring stuff doing”
“Things unnoticed”
“Fostering innovation”
“Dropping -g s”
“Write, wire, telephone or call”
“Varying degrees of small”
“Go buy some pencils”
“Line, please”
“My faux outrage was real”
“Take that, current events!”
“On account of because”
“I don’t really consider anything trivial”
“Repeatedly, repeatedly”
“He’s in the library”
“Near-realism”
“That’s it”
“I’m getting vibrations”
“The thrill of the small”
“Okeh”
“What the deuce are we all here for anyway”
Enclosed in invisible quotation marks
“Roiling tensions”
“Even so”
“My own grown-up self”
“A trade-last for you”
“One after another after another”
“Just loop it”
“Swing that music”
“Prepare as usual”
“Tends toward the messy”
“Like stationery stores for cheap”
“On-site”
“Milk with the cookies”
“Very deep”
“A container”
“A highly convoluted neighborhood”
“These spaces for rent”
“Yep”
“Finely stitched together with punctuation”
“You must promise to stay here forever”
“Chases dirt”
“Collect them all”
“On the words”
“Getting my Fowler on”
“Seriously”
“Sympathist”

For completists: there are another two hundred and fifty lines preceding these. Yes, “Collect them all.”

“There is no such thing as not voting”

I posted this bit in November 2010. It’s worth repeating:

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting; you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.

David Foster Wallace, “Up, Simba: Seven Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2007).

I voted early for Hillary Clinton. I wasn’t happy about it: I consider her ethically challenged and troublingly hawkish. And I’m deeply angered by the Democratic National Committee’s treatment of Bernie Sanders’s campaign. But voting for Clinton was the only choice I could make — because there are, for practical purposes, just two candidates.

The choice, for me, came down to climate-change policy and Supreme Court nominations. I’m not willing to let those matters fall into Donald Trump’s smaller-than-average hands for the next four years, and I don’t believe that four years of Trump would mean an Elizabeth Warren victory in 2020. A country that would elect Trump once would, I fear, elect him again.

And I don’t think it’s reasonable to vote for Jill Stein because Clinton will win Illinois anyway. If I’d rather see Clinton than Trump elected, I think I should be willing to vote for her. Categorical imperative and all that.

Bob Cranshaw (1932–2016)

The bassist Bob Cranshaw has died at the age of eighty-three. The Washington Post has an obituary.

I heard Bob Cranshaw perform with Sonny Rollins in 1989 and 2006. Cranshaw was Rollins’s bassist for more than fifty years.

PBS, sheesh

From tonight’s PBS NewsHour : “In this campaign, the topic of refugees from war-torn Syria have been a political flash point.” The transcript has subject and verb agreeing. But have is still there in the video clip.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois , November 7, 2016.]

This mom really does have eyes in the back of her head. Also a face. Yikes. Regan MacNeil has nothing on Lois Flagston.

The swivel in this panel makes the flipped head in a recent strip seem like a party trick. And the swivel makes the vanishing doorknob plate in today’s second panel seem just routine. Things go missing all the time.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

[Hi to Lois: “Honey, you have a good head on your shoulders. But use more glue.”]

Slavic Soul Party! Plays Duke Ellington’s “Far East Suite”

Slavic Soul Party! Plays Duke Ellington’s “Far East Suite.” Ropeadope Records. 2016.

Early or late, elements of the “exotic” often surfaced in Duke Ellington’s music: the growling trumpet and trombone of his 1920s “jungle band,” the misterioso swirl of “Caravan” and “Conga Brava,” the “nouvelle vague exotique“ of Afro-Bossa , the “down under and/or out back” of The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse . The Far East Suite (1966), the last great Ellington-Strayhorn collaboration, is a sustained adventure in the exotic. The work is awkwardly named, having been inspired by the Ellington band’s 1963 travels in Syria, Jordan, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and a 1964 visit to Japan. The 1963 tour, sponsored by the U. S. State Department, was cut short by the Kennedy assassination, before the band could go on to Cyprus, Egypt, and Greece. How wonderfully strange then that in 2016 a group of New York musicians should continue the journey by Balkanizing this music.

It’s no gimmick: Slavic Soul Party! has reimagined The Far East Suite with deep respect and understanding. The arrangements (by Matt Moran, Jonas Müller, and Peter Hess) evoke their Ellington-Strayhorn sources without falling into mere imitation. The challenge of adapting the material for the band’s instrumentation finds ingenious solutions: the wide intervals of “Ad Lib on Nippon,” for instance, an easy matter for a pianist, are distributed among trombone, clarinet, and accordion, making for unusual tonalities. “Isfahan,” a Johnny Hodges specialty, becomes a slow drag that suggests Kurt Weill, mariachis, and a New Orleans funeral band. “Bluebird of Delhi” and “Amad” detour into intensely rhythmic episodes for clarinet, trombones, and percussion. The musicianship at all times is superb. I especially like hearing Peter Hess, whose baritone saxophone suggests the massive sound of Harry Carney, and whose clarinet evokes both klezmer wails and the urbane Jimmy Hamilton (a major voice in the original Far East Suite ). Among Hess’s responsibilities here: suggesting the majesty of the Taj Mahal in “Agra,” as Carney did before him.

The best non-Ellington recordings of Ellington-Strayhorn music are those that transform their source material into something new: I think immediately of Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron’s Sempre Amore , the Modern Jazz Quartet’s For Ellington , and World Saxophone Quartet Plays Duke Ellington . I place this recording in that company.

One more thing: The exclamation point in the group’s name is warranted. It is impossible to sit still when this record is on.

The program:
Tourist Point of View : Bluebird of Dehli : Isfahan : Depk : Mount Harissa : Blue Pepper : Agra : Amad : Ad Lib on Nippon

The musicians:
John Carlson, Kenny Warren, trumpets : Peter Hess, saxophones and clarinet : Peter Stan, accordion : Matt Musselman, Tim Vaughn, trombones : Ron Caswell, tuba : Chris Stromquist, snare and percussion : Matt Moran, tapan/goč/bunanj

Related reading and listening
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)
Slavic Soul Party! (Listen here)
Live performances of “Amad” from 2013 and 2015 (YouTube)

[Four asides: 1. “Caravan” and “Conga Brava” are largely the work of Ellington’s valve-trombonist Juan Tizol. 2. The phrases “nouvelle vague exotique” and “down under and/or out back” are Ellington’s. 3. Matt Moran’s credit may be a bit of a joke: as far as I can tell, tapan, goč, and bunanj (the first two Serbian, the last Bosnian) all mean the same thing: drum. 4. Something I don’t get: the album cover. Elephant? Ellington? Upside-down?]

Usage tip of the day

From Leddy’s Imaginary Dictionary of Usage (2016).

Harumph!

Also from this non-existent volume: entries for get , killing it , and nice .

Thanks to J. D. Lowe for asking about own it .

Some operator

[Henry , November 5, 2016.]

Wait — is she a? Yes, she’s an elevator operator. The mysterious circle under her hand is no futuristic handbag: it’s the lever that makes the elevator stop where it needs to, more or less aligned with a floor. Not all operators get it right. (See Davey McQuinn.)

Wikipedia has an article with some details of where elevator operators are still at work. I last rode with an elevator operator in the Fine Arts Building in Chicago. It was modern times, this past spring: no hat, no gloves, no uniform.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)