Jerry Lewis (1926–2017)

[“Jerry Lewis and Chimpanzee.” Photograph by Peter Stackpole. February 2, 1950. From the Life Photo Archive.]

It feels like the end of a show-business era. The New York Times has an obituary.

DISCARD

A library-sale find: Anna Jane Grossman’s Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (New York: Abrams Image, 2009): anonymity, bellhops, correction fluid, and so on. On the back flyleaf, stamped in red: DISCARD.

“In a Sentimental Mood,” two takes

“If a student wants to sound like Ellington, there’s no point in looking at The Real Book”: at The New Yorker, the pianist Ethan Iverson writes about Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, “In a Sentimental Mood,” and “scalar thought.”

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

Blowhard

[The New Yorker, August 28, 2017.]

This cover illustration, by David Plunkett, is titled Blowhard. Says the artist, “A picture does a better job showing my thoughts than words do; it can have a light touch on a subject that’s extremely scary.”

Related images
Protesting Racism and Hate with Political Art (Print)

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)