Why I am not a tree trimmer

I have a fear of heights, for one thing. It’s been with me from childhood. No bucket trucks for me. At the top of a tall staircase I hesitate, just for a second. I like banisters. At the top of an escalator I hesitate before choosing my step. The DC Metro escalators — yikes. But I managed. And I’ve climbed as high as the fifth rung of an eight-foot ladder to remove the filter panel from one of our Fujitsu ductless mini-splits. We have two, and they do a great job of cooling our house — and heating it, until the temperature begins to really drop, and then it’s simpler to put the furnace on. And get this: when the first system that our plumbing and heating and cooling guy installed didn’t work properly, because the mini-splits were just over the maximum distance at which they could function in tandem, a distance nowhere made clear in the manufacturer’s specs, our guy replaced the system at his own expense. But we gave him a very large gift certificate for our local barbecue restaurant, where we’d seen him and his family many a time.

Also, a lack of the necessary equipment (bucket trucks, &c.), and a lack of the inclination and ability that I would need for it to make sense to invest in that equipment. And did I mention that I have a fear of heights?

On Veterans Day

“November,” The Rural Life (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).

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... and does

“Sweet Lorraine” (Cliff Burwell-Mitchell Parish). Tony Bennett with Bobby Hackett, baritone ukelele; Joe Marsala, clarinet; Hal Gaylor, bass; Billy Exiner, drums. March 11, 1965. From the Bennett compilation Jazz (Columbia, 1987). Bennett says in the liner notes that when this song was recorded, Marsala hadn’t played clarinet for ten or twelve years and hadn’t recorded in twenty.

If music isn’t the healing force of the universe, it will have to do, Until the Real Thing Comes Along, if ever.

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Tony Bennett at ninety : Tony Bennett has to sing : Tony Bennett’s pencil : “We’re all here”

[Apologies if an ad kicks on. There’s no way to avoid ads when embedding YouTube.]

Tony Bennett has to sing

Tony Bennett, interviewed by James Isaacs, June 24, 1986:

Did you have to sing?

I have to sing, yes.

When did you know that?

When Joe Williams told me, “It’s not that you want to sing, you have to sing.” And I said to myself, “You know, he’s right.” I never really thought of it.

When was this?

About six years ago in Vegas.

That late?

Yeah.

From the liner notes for the Bennett compilation Jazz (Columbia, 1987). I’m making my way through my dad’s CDs: Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Ivie Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Mildred Bailey, Count Basie, Tony Bennett. Next stop: Art Blakey. Music is much better for my mental health than the news. Really, there’s no comparison.

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Tony Bennett at ninety : Tony Bennett sings “Sweet Lorraine” : Tony Bennett’s pencil : “We’re all here”

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.

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Duce redux
Dunning K. Trump
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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.

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