Annie Ross (1930–2020)

The singer and actor Annie Ross has died at the age of eighty-nine. The New York Times has an obituary.

Annie Ross’s voice is one I’ve known from childhood. The Lambert, Hendricks & Ross album Sing a Song of Basie (1957) was a household favorite in my early years. Later I bought my own copy.

It turns out that I’ve known Annie Ross’s voice from childhood in a second way, minus Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks. The Times obituary notes that the girl who sings “Loch Lomond” in a 1938 Our Gang short was Annie Ross.

Here’s Annie Ross performing her best known tune, “Twisted,” with her lyrics fitted to Wardell Gray’s tenor saxophone solo from an instrumental recording of the same name.


[Annie Ross, with Count Basie and his rhythm section: Freddie Green, guitar; Eddie Jones, bass; Sonny Payne, drums. Jon Hendricks is snapping by the fireplace. Tony Bennett is digging the sounds. From Playboy’s Penthouse (October 1959).]

Doodles

[A two-page spread of doodles from Russell M. Arundel’s Everybody’s Pixillated (1937). Life, May 24, 1937. Click either image for a larger view.]

All I can say is that I’ve never felt closer to Herbert Hoover. His doodles could be a margin in one of my notebooks from college.

A related post
Words in movies: pixilated, doodle, doodler, doodling

Words in movies

Four words, in one movie, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (dir. Frank Capra, 1936).

The first word is pixilated, which two elderly residents of Mandrake Falls, Vermont, agree describes Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) — and everyone else in Mandrake Falls, Vermont, except themselves. The Oxford English Dictionary definition:

Chiefly U.S. regional. Slightly crazed; bewildered, confused; fey, whimsical; (also) intoxicated.

In the movie a psychiatrist explains:

“The word pixilated is an early American expression derived from the word pixies, meaning ‘elves.’ They would say ‘The pixies have got him,’ as we nowadays would say that a man is balmy.”

Or they might have said that the man was pixie-led. That’s a much older word in the OED. And now I’m thinking of Yeats’s “The Stolen Child.” Come away with us, you stupid human!

Five years after the movie, the folklorist Fannie Hardy Eckstorm wrote about pixilated:

The word pixilated had a nationwide vogue in 1936, following its use in the sound film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Most people probably thought of it as the clever coinage of a Hollywood scenarist; but the student of the local lore of New England knows that is is a well established old Marblehead [Massachusetts] word.

“‘Pixilated,’ a Marblehead Word,” American Speech) 16, no. 1 (1941).

The earliest citation Eckstorm offers (now the earliest in the OED) is from an 1848 campaign song for Zachary Taylor:

You’ll never find on any trip
That he’ll be pix-e-lated.

Three more words from Mr. Deeds: doodle (verb), doodling (noun), and doodler. Mr. Deeds explains that “everybody does something silly when they’re thinking” — playing the tuba, for instance, or filling in the o s on a printed page:

“Other people are doodlers. That’s a name we made up back home for people who make foolish designs on paper when they’re thinking. It’s called doodling. Almost everybody’s a doodler.”

For the verb, the OED has a first citation from a 1937 essay that references Capra’s film. The dictionary has nothing for doodler until 1960 (“Poetry is not the free unfettered self-expression of the doodler”), but there it is, in Mr. Deeds’s mouth, back in 1936.

The word missing from Deeds’s explanation: the noun doodle, which the OED defines as “an aimless scrawl made by a person while his mind is more or less otherwise applied.” As for etymology: “compare Low German dudeltopf, -dop, simpleton, noodle, lit. night-cap.”

And — hokey smokes! — the dictionary’s first citation for the noun doodle is from Russell M. Arundel, Everybody’s Pixillated (1937):

“Doodle” is a scribbling or sketch made while the conscious mind is concerned with matters wholely unrelated to the scribbling.

Arundel’s title makes clear that Mr. Deeds Goes to Town did indeed bring doodle into common use.

But wait — there’s more: from Life, May 24, 1937, a two-page spread of doodles.

[Arundel was quite a character.]

Some stamps

[Nancy, October 17, 1950. Click for larger stamps.]

The teacher has suggested that the children take up hobbies. Nancy has chosen philately. Sluggo is training Reggie’s pony.

“Some,” as in “rocks,” is an abiding preoccupation of these pages.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Is it fascism yet?

Former senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin), speaking about Donald Trump* and the Department of Homeland Security:

Feingold said both the Trump administration’s actions in Portland and President Trump’s threats to send federal agents to patrol cities with Democratic mayors are part of a “truly dystopian picture” that is worse than anything that was imagined during the George W. Bush administration. These actions, he added, are more appropriate for “a completely lawless country without any protection of the rule of law” than the United States of America.

“This is right out there in the open and is a direct affront to American democracy. People should be able to express their political views consistent with the First Amendment and not be afraid of reprisal from the federal government,” he said. “What I was warning about in 2001 was what would happen if we elected somebody who really didn’t have any respect for our system of government, and that’s where we are today. He [Trump] and his administration are doubling down on the most frightening series of threats that any of us have ever seen in our democracy.”

😱

News, at least to me: Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the basis for the face screaming in fear emoji, may not depict a person screaming. Aiieee!

Thanks, Ben.

Recently updated

A P.S. 131 class picture, 1964–1965 There was much more to my third-grade teacher’s life than met my third-grade eye.

Tom Finn (1948–2020)

Tom Finn, bassist and singer with the Left Banke, died last month at the age of seventy-one.

Here are two songs from The Left Banke Too (1968). Finn wrote them and sings lead: “Nice to See You” and “There’s Gonna Be a Storm.” Baroque pop, yes.

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Steve Martin Caro (1948–2020) : George Cameron (1947–2018) : What I hear in “Walk Away Renée”

“Have been and will always be”

Germany has invaded France. An unnamed man has fled Paris. He’s stuck in Marseille, living on pizza, rosé, and ersatz coffee.


Anna Seghers, Transit. 1951. Trans. from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: New York Review Books, 2013).

The narrator’s reverence for “things that have been and will always be there” reminds me of Holden Caulfield’s affection for museum dioramas: “everything always stayed right where it was.” See also “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Seghers’s novel, the basis for the 2018 film of the same name, is a forlorn meditation on contingency and identity. It’s another New York Review Books rediscovery.

This post is for the pizza makers in the fambly. And yes, the most cursory search will confirm that Marseille, still, means pizza.

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Pizza with sardines (Inspired by Transit)

The Oedipus Project

“Arrogant leadership, ignored prophecy, and a pestilence”: Theater of War has created The Oedipus Project, a staged reading (via Zoom) of scenes from Sophocles’s Oedipus. I hope a recording comes online for everyone who, like me, missed it live.