In the news

Our local newspaper has had a 1200 × 675 version of this image front and center on its website, all week. That’s the big story, at least online: the fidget-spinner craze and whether it will last. That’s the news.

What would Drucker think?

Rick Wartzman of the Drucker Institute writes about what Peter Drucker might have thought about Donald Trump’s response to events in Charlottesville:

Drucker would have discerned one aspect of an extremely disturbing pattern: a nod and wink from a man who rode into the nation’s highest office by playing on “the despair of the masses” (or at least those of the white working class); by promising them “a miracle . . . which belies the evidence of one’s reason” (like the return of their old manufacturing and coal jobs); and by creating “demonic enemies” for them to rail against (whether Muslims or Mexican immigrants, or his African-American predecessor in the Oval Office). Tellingly, each of these quotations is from The End of Economic Man, Drucker’s 1939 book about the origins of fascism in Europe.

Other Drucker-related posts
On figuring out where one belongs : On income disparity in higher ed : On integrity in leadership : On efficiency and effectiveness

[I am an unlikely reader of Peter Drucker’s work. No management type, I. I caught on by way of the excellent little book On Managing Onself (2008).]

More resignations

On an arts and humanities note:

The New York Times reports that all sixteen members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities have resigned. A dozen other members had already resigned rather than serve under Donald Trump. All members, it seems, had been appointed by Barack Obama. From the Times article: “The committee never convened under Mr. Trump, members said, and the president has not appointed members so far.”

An excerpt from the committee members’ August 18 letter of resignation:

Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.

The first letters of the letter’s five paragraphs and closing spell R-E-S-I-S-T.

How long before resignations of far greater political consequence begin? Who will be the first Cabinet member to resign in protest?

*

10:20 p.m.: From The Washington Post: “In a statement late Friday, the White House claimed that Trump had decided earlier this month to disband the committee by not renewing its charter when it expires at the end of the year.”

Yeah, sure. Here we see a repeat of what happened when members of the American Manufacturing Council resigned and the members of the Strategic and Policy Forum agreed to disband: Trump dissolved the groups. You can’t resign, because I’m firing you. The committee website makes no mention of a presidential decision to disband. A picture of Melania Trump sits in the sidebar, where she is identified as both Honorary Chairman and Honorary Chair. Jeez, proofread.

Paul Oliver (1920–2017)

Paul Oliver, a prolific writer on blues music, has died at the age of ninety. The New York Times has an obituary.

As a teenager, I borrowed Oliver’s The Story of the Blues (1969) from the library, again and again. The first blues record I ever bought: the Columbia double-album The Story of the Blues (1969), designed to accompany the book. A world opened.

I learned from the Times obituary that Oliver was a distinguished architectural historian. Who knew? (Not me.) Blues was what a colleague of mine would call Oliver’s sidebar life.

Pocket notebook sighting

[Le Million (dir. René Clair, 1930).]

The winning number in the Dutch lottery is 27009. But who bought that ticket, Prosper, or Michel? This notebook holds the answer. The camera pans across the page as if reading: thus what looks like a faulty screenshot.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Foreign Correspondent : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Last Laugh : The Lodger : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window

“CIRCUS THEN”

[Henry, August 18, 2017.]

This panel looks a bit too pixelated as a 2017 rerun. It belongs in the past, with that circus and that billboard.

Today’s Henry shows once again that the strip’s billboards are of the lattice variety.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

News of the future

It’s not yet in The New York Times, not yet in The Washington Post: Congressman Steve Cohen (D, Tennessee-9) “will be introducing articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump following the President’s comments on the horrific events in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

Zippy’s Darkroom

[Zippy, August 17, 2018. Click for a larger view.]

It’s real, and I found it by searching for vintage camera shop. Here’s a page with a color photograph. And here’s a photograph in living black and white:


[“The Dark Room, 5370 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, CA.” Photograph by Marvin Rand. 1972–1977. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Click for a larger view.]

Bill Griffith has drawn The Darkroom in a more recent incarnation as La Boca del Conga. That restaurant disappeared before Google Maps, which does preserve El Toro Cantina, which itself for a time preserved La Boca’s awning. (See the second panel.) Today 5370 is the home of Spare Tire Kitchen & Tavern. The background in the first panel checks out: that tower is real, and dammit, I’ve been to the Staples (not pictured) right across the street from it. And missed The Darkroom. (Not next time!) The signage in the second panel — THERAPY, DRUGS — is, I think, Griffith’s commentary on the function of nostalgia.

 
[El Toro Cantina, 2009. Spare Tire Kitchen & Tavern, 2016. From Google Maps.]

You can read Zippy every day at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Orange pump art

[“Far-go gas pump, Main Street.” Photograph By John Margolies. Barstow, California, 1979. From the Library of Congress feature John Margolies: Roadside America.]

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 stereograminator 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

Eleanor Roosevelt on happiness

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. After a short time, a very short time, there would be little that one really enjoyed. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people.

Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1960).

Also from this book
On doing what you think you cannot do : On honoring the human race : On attention : On maturity : On optimism