At the center

I turned on the television and heard an MSNBC anchor describe Stormy Daniels as the person “at the center of Michael Cohen’s legal troubles.” No, that would be Michael Cohen.

Or better: Michael Cohen’s legal troubles are a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

From my dad’s CDs

I’m still making my way through my dad’s CDs: Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Ivie Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Mildred Bailey, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Art Blakey, Ruby Braff and Ellis Larkins, Clifford Brown, Dave Brubeck, Joe Bushkin, Hoagy Carmichael, Betty Carter, Ray Charles, Charlie Christian, Rosemary Clooney, Nat “King” Cole, John Coltrane, Bing Crosby, Miles Davis, Matt Dennis, Doris Day, Blossom Dearie, Paul Desmond, Tommy Dorsey, Billy Eckstine, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Stéphane Grappelli, Bobby Hackett, Coleman Hawkins, Woody Herman, Earl Hines, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Dick Hyman, Harry James, Hank Jones, Louis Jordan, Stan Kenton, Barney Kessel, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, Peggy Lee, Mary Ann McCall, Susannah McCorkle, Dave McKenna, Ray McKinley, Marian McPartland, Johnny Mercer, Helen Merrill, Glenn Miller, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Thelonious Monk, Wes Montgomery, Gerry Mulligan, Red Norvo, Anita O’Day, Charlie Parker, Joe Pass, Art Pepper, Oscar Peterson, Bud Powell, Boyd Raeburn, Django Reinhardt, Marcus Roberts, Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Rushing, Catherine Russell, the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, Artie Shaw, George Shearing, Horace Silver, Frank Sinatra, Paul Smith, Jeri Southern, Jo Stafford, Art Tatum, Claude Thornhill, and now, Mel Tormé.

My dad and I never agreed about Mel Tormé. I think of Tormé as an acquired taste that I’ve yet to acquire. The voice is a wonder; the technique, unlimited. But Tormé’s taste is, for me, too often questionable. Too much show business, too much showing off: scatting the name Jobim, interpolating “Superstar” — yes, that “Superstar” — in a tribute to Fred Astaire (“Fred Astaire, superstar, you know we admire who and what you are”), ending numbers with an extended “Yeah.” Help! I once told my dad about one of John Lennon’s recording aliases: Mel Torment. My dad was not amused.

But listen: here are two unembeddable and unremittingly terrific performances from the 1963 Atlantic album Mel Tormé Sings “Sunday in New York” and Other Songs about New York. Frank Sinatra introduced “The Brooklyn Bridge” (Sammy Cahn–Jules Styne) in the 1947 film It Happened in Brooklyn. Tormé introduced “Sunday in New York” (Peter Nero–Carroll Coates) in the 1963 film of that name. Johnny Williams did the first arrangement; Dick Hazard, the second. The second of these songs immediately puts me in touch with the 1960s Manhattan of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The World of Henry Orient.

Three mountain ranges remain: Sarah Vaughan (I hadn’t realized how many CDs), Fats Waller (see previous parenthesis), and Lee Wiley. And smaller hills along the way.

Also from my dad’s CDs
Mildred Bailey : Tony Bennett : Charlie Christian : Blossom Dearie : Duke Ellington : Coleman Hawkins : Billie Holiday : Louis Jordan : Charlie Parker : Jimmy Rushing : Artie Shaw : Frank Sinatra : Art Tatum

Zippy pens

[Zippy, April 16, 2018.]

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Typewriter ribbons

[Henry, April 16, 2018.]

Henry, surrealist? Not really: he has just passed Notions, a store with hair ribbons in the window.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

“Varied and impenetrable”

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2001).

Also from Austerlitz
Austerlitz on time : Marks on time : Language as a city : Objects in windows

Smells like childhood

In The New York Times, Sofija Stefanovic’s essay on the smells of her childhood prompts readers to recall smells from their own childhoods.

Me: bus exhaust, bubble gum, Camel cigarettes, caps for toy guns, my elementary school’s basement, laundry air-dried in my grandparents’ basement. I think it’s odd that three of these six smells are the result of combustion. Or maybe four: the school basement’s smell was due at least in part to cooking for school lunches. I always thought of the smell as years of spilled soup.

See also David Owens’s essay on the smells of his childhood. Also this post about fresh cookies and fresh ironing, and this one about revisiting my elementary school, whose basement still had the same smell.

[I am well aware that childhood can also smell like burning buildings and chemical weapons.]

From the Saturday Stumper

A distant memory in today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper: 14-Across, nine letters: “Early Internet radio format.” No spoilers; the answer is in the comments.

Today’s puzzle is by “Anna Stiga,” or “Stan again,” Newsday ’s crossword editor, Stan Newman. The pen name is meant to signal an easier Saturday puzzle. But I found today’s Stumper difficult. Why? The grid offers very few ways to move from one part of the puzzle to another.

“Demagogues and charlatans”

Rob Riemen:

The institutions that should protect us exist only by grace of the trust that people have in them. Put demagogues and charlatans in charge, use the mass media to cultivate the belief that this leader, the antipolitical politician, is the only person who can save the country — and the constitutional, democratic institutions will disappear just as quickly as the authorities become impotent because no one believes in them anymore.

“The Eternal Return of Fascism,” in To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018).

The essay in which this passage appears was first published in Dutch in 2010.

You can watch and listen to a short conversation with Riemen at Salon. I’ll have something to say about this book soon.

Strunk and White and Comey

James Comey, in a New York Times interview about reading:

What books over the years have most influenced your thinking?

Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man had a huge impact on me, as did Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, which was one of 12 books in my college course “Significant Books in Western Religion.”

But Comey explains: “The professor believed that all ideas are wasted that can’t be clearly expressed.” The Elements of Style must have been supplemental reading.

Related reading
All OCA Strunk and White posts (Pinboard)

The uni-ball Roller

I don’t know what made me want to buy and write with a uni-ball Roller. I hadn’t used one in many years, not since my grad school years. Back then I bought these pens one or two at a time from a stationery store. Now I could find them only by the dozen in an office-supply store. Back then these pens were state of the art. Now they’re relatively cheap, about a dollar apiece, and their packaging touts eco-friendliness: “Plastic components made from 80% post-consumer waste (majority from recycled electronics).” Back then I would have written Uni-Ball. Now I’m using the company’s lowercase, though uni-ball Roller looks more than slightly odd.

What’s strange and wonderful: uni-ball Rollers (0.7 and 0.5mm) look and feel virtually the same as they did when I was a grad student. The clips have lost their “EF” (for Eberhard Faber) and now sport a tiny “eco” on a leaf, and the 0.5 clip no longer says “Micro.” But everything else looks the same: the same slightly flexible black plastic, the same notches at the top of the cap (three for 0.7, five for 0.5). And the pens feel the same on paper: slippery, with far less control than a fountain pen affords. I used a 0.7 to make some notes yesterday, and my handwriting turned into the same fast scrawl I fell into more than thirty years ago, when I’d write on a legal pad before typing a first draft. I don’t like what the uni-ball Roller does to my handwriting, but I like seeing it happen.

You can see the Roller on this page of uni-ball products. Select roller and capped, and there it is.

A related post
Five pens (My life in pens)