Play Music on the Porch Day

[Better late than never.]

It’s (still) Play Music on the Porch Day.

Elaine and I played this morning, viola and guitar, for twenty or thirty people, using the available shade in our front yard. Everyone was masked and keeping proper distance. Our set list:

On a Little Street in Singapore : I Cover the Waterfront : Georgia on My Mind : Sweet Georgia Brown : Lullaby of the Leaves : Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man : It Had to Be You : Nice Work If You Can Get It : The Song Is You : Nuages : Alfalfa Medley: I’m in the Mood for Love /I’m Thru with Love : Love Is Here to Stay : Pennies from Heaven : In a Mizz : Boulevard of Broken Dreams : Walk Away Renee : Orange Crate Art : Speak Low : Molambo : When Day Is Done

And now, in the words of Ringo Starr, “I got blisters on my fingers!” Really. I’ve written most of this post with dictation.

We are already planning to do it again, and we’re not waiting until next August. On our list: Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Willard Robison, Fats Waller, and “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” And maybe no blisters.

[Last live music before today: as a listener, March 8; as a player, March 13.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell. A thirty-two-minute workout, targeting all major muscle groups.

Many clue-and-answer pairs to admire here:

1-A, ten letters, “Creators of story lines.” N-A-R-R-A-T-O-R-? Oops, no.

8-D, seven letters, “Green-haired Lincoln or Washington.” Somehow I flashed on our old Walgreens, which like every Walgreens, has no apostrophe in its name. I just checked.

11-D, six letters, “Many Oktoberfest deliveries.” Exceedingly misleading.

15-A, ten letters, “Approaches a runway too fast.” This post, which will reveal the answer, explains how I happen to know the answer.

23-D, eleven letters, “Welles’ War of the Worlds landing site.” I had it confused with a Thornton Wilder town, but ETs, to my knowledge, never stopped there. Or did they?

27-A, four letters, “Something often penciled in.” No, Michael, it can’t be APPT, because there’s nothing in the clue to signal an abbreviated answer.

30-D, six letters, “Embroidery sample.” What?

43-A, six letters, “Copy righting.” Clever.

59-D, three letters, “Vowelless Scrabble play.” The answer, fortunately, is not one of those ridiculous Scrabble words like CWM.

61-A, ten letters, “Ferocious problem-solvers.” I’m from academia, so the idea of people ferociously solving problems is pretty foreign to me. SUBCOMMITTEE? Hah.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk

“I didn't want to become a chalk dealer, but I did like the idea that I could be the ’first stick is free’ chalk dealer on the block in my department”: from CNN, the story of Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk, a favorite of mathematicians.

I’d like to try it — just one stick. One of the things I don’t miss about teaching: the cracked fingertips made worse by chalk dust in the whorls. Perhaps Hagoromo would be an improvement.

[Found via Luke Leighfield’s newsletter Ten Things. I’ve repunctuated the sentence from CNN to make it more readable.]

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November 23, 2020: The New York Times visited the factory.

Charlie Parker centennial

The alto saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker was born on August 29, 1920. Columbia University’s WKCR is playing his recordings around the clock, today through September 2.

I can claim to have known one musician who played with (or behind) Parker: the composer and cellist Seymour Barab, who was a member of the orchestra for Bird with Strings at New York’s Birdland. Seymour said that from set to set, night after night, every Parker solo on a given tune was a new creation.

If I had to choose just one Parker recording to listen to again and again, it’d be this one: “Embraceable You” (George and Ira Gershwin), with Miles Davis, trumpet; Duke Jordan, piano; Tommy Potter, bass; and Max Roach, drums. Recorded October 28, 1947. I’ve always thought of this recording as signifying autumn and overcoats, so I’m disappointed to learn that the temperature in New York City that day was up in the 70s, a fact I hope to forget.

“This country does not love us back”

“It’s amazing why we keep loving this country and this country does not love us back”: Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers.

Listen to his complete statement.

Sour-deens

A pause in Lena Grove’s travels:



And the moment of decision:


William Faulkner, Light in August (1932).

When I taught Light in August for the last time, I brought sardines and crackers for the class. Everyone loved them. No, I cannot tell a lie.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[For some reason, or no reason, sardine posts tend to appear on Thursdays.]

“Anthony! Anthony!”

Anthony Martingnetti, the “Anthony! Anthony!” of a Prince spaghetti commercial, has died at the age of sixty-three. The New York Times has an obituary, commercial included.

I remember “Anthony! Anthony!” not so much from the commercial as from Bob and Ray’s radio repurposing of it. The mother’s shout, racing feet, and a door slamming. After which Bob or Ray would say something like “There goes that kid again.” A sweet form of pop-culture fame.

“It clarifies the palate”

It’s 3:45 a.m. The scene is a beach club. Lew Archer, private detective, had some business here with the club’s owner, who’s passed out drunk in his office. What to do? There’s a light in the lifeguard’s room. The lifeguard is Joseph Tobias, twenty-five, Black, a Korean War vet and, now, an English major working his way through school. He’s been studying, reading Elements of Sociology as a party winds down, and now he’s offered to make Archer a cup of coffee. Archer is dead tired. Tobias says that the only time he ever felt tired was in Korea. Archer narrates:



And later:


Ross Macdonald, The Barbarous Coast (1956).

“It clarifies the palate”: I can’t tell you a thing about the plot of The Barbarous Coast, but that line has stuck in my head since I read the novel in the late 1970s.

Purple prose

From TYWKIWDBI, a college exam, in beautiful ditto purple. Readers of a certain age will immediately flash back to classroom “handouts,” still warm and slightly damp in the early morning, an exotic aroma rising from the paper.

I have any number of purple syllabi and handouts in my notebooks from college, usually typed, sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed with handwritten corrections added. (It was a different time.) In my earliest teaching days, I got to run a spirit duplicator and make purple pages all by myself. Later, still as a grad student, I had a free pass to use a department Xerox machine to copy articles and chunks of books. (Why not?) As a professor, I found such stuff off limits: the department machines were for staff and student workers only.

I have spent too much time this morning trying to figure out how a page printed with a dot-matrix printer (an Apple ImageWriter II) turned into the purple handout in this post. Did I run a ditto master through the printer? How could it have made an impression? And if that’s not what I did, what did “they” — the people with access to the machines — do to create a purple page?

Thanks to Ian Bagger for pointing me to the exam and an excellent (new to me) blog.

A related post
A 1940 advertisement for the A.B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator

NKDC

Elaine and I just made the mistake of turning on the television. And there she was. Within seconds, we said “North Korea.”

Not DKNY. NKDC.

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Screenshot, the next morning:


[Click for a larger, still more autocratic view.]