BILL’S RESTAURANT

A confusing chyron on The 11th Hour just now:

GOP SENATOR BRAGS ABOUT BILL’S RESTAURANT
      BENEFITS AFTER NOT VOTING TO PASS IT

“State Street Rag”

Thinking about guitar and mandolin duets, I thought of this recording:

[“State Street Rag” (Bogan–Armstrong). Louie Bluie (Howard Armstrong), mandolin; Ted Bogan, guitar. Recorded in 1934).]

On the flip side, “Ted’s Stomp” (Bogan–Armstrong), for violin and guitar.

Notice that the illustration accompanying the recording is by Howard Armstrong. For more of his life, music, and visual art, see Terry Zwigoff’s 1985 documentary Louie Bluie.

Small pleasures

From Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (dir. Albert Lewin, 1951). We watched this movie last night. Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner) inquires of Stephen Cameron (Nigel Patrick):

“What is today’s date, Stephen?”

“March the ninth.”

[No. 5 in a series.]

Yazoo Zippy, sort of

In today’s Zippy, Bill Griffith pays tribute to his great-grandfather, the painter and photographer William Henry Jackson. I knew there was something familiar about this image of two musicians.

[“Picture Maker.” Zippy, March 10, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

Of course: another Jackson photograph from this depot scene appears (uncredited) on the cover on the 1972 Yazoo LP Blues From The Western States 1927–1949 (L-1032). Here’s that photograph: Waiting for the Sunday Boat. You can see the album cover in this illustrated Yazoo discography. And here’s the photograph Griffith captures in today’s strip: True Lovers of the Muse.

*

Later in the day: I just discovered an earlier glimpse of True Lovers of the Muse on page 5 of Griffith’s Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist (2015), where the artist depicts himself examining the photograph with a magnifying glass.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Orange Crate Art, footnoting the comics since whenever.]

Louis Stettner in Penn Station

An online exhibition from the Tibor de Nagy Gallery: Louis Stettner’s The Penn Station Series (1958), twenty black-and-white photographs.

Would pair well with Walker Evans’s 1938–1941 subway photographs (collected under the title Many Are Called). Also with Stanley Kubrick’s 1946 photographs in New York subways. And with his film Killer’s Kiss (1955), which begins and ends in Penn Station. And with Aaron Rose’s photographs documenting the destruction of Penn Station.

“Paradises lost”

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).

This idea reappears in Finding Time Again: “les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus.”

The large and ordinary world as I knew it before March 2020 feels like that paradise right now.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Ian Patterson’s translation in Finding Time Again: “the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost.”]

Dr. Leddy, practicing

There’s an orthopedic surgeon out there somewhere who doesn’t know his own e-mail address. I’ve received everything from flight information to receipts for garden equipment, all genuine, all meant for him. Today in the mail:

Hi Dr. Leddy,

I did a little bit of research into your practice and identified a few opportunities to drive in more patients for ACL tear, sports medicine & knee replacement to the practice.

Yes, it’s a genuine e-mail, not from someone whose idea of driving in more patients involves hammers and dark alleys.

I’ve wasted time with e-mail and, when necessary, on the phone, trying to set things straight with different businesses. I even have a shortcut — notme — to generate a quick e-mail reply:

This is not me. My e-mail address has a period. Gmail ignores periods, so anything sent to [e-mail address with no period] comes to me. Here’s an article that explains what’s happening:

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-says-period-in-gmail-address-doesnt-matter-2018-2

But today I wrote

Please remove me from your mailings. I assure you that I’m not capable of replacing anyone's knee. :)

[“The practice”: LOL. Indeed, I would be practicing.]

The Histories (Old Black Joe)

The Histories (Old Black Joe) is a new 45 from Van Dyke Parks, released by the Chicago gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey.

Side A is an adaptation/arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe,” written for The Histories (Old Black Joe), a 2020 installation by the artist David Hartt. Parks’s reimagining of Foster’s plaintive tune is an amazing piece of musique concrète, with orchestra, slide guitar, barking dogs, cracking whips, an antique voice singing fragments of Foster’s lyrics, and a bit of the Esso Trinidad Steel Band playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.” And there’s more. This production recalls Parks’s music for Datsun and Ice Capades, and it challenges his Song Cycle for sheer audacious invention.

Side B is an adaptation/arrangement of Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Souvenir de la Havane,” the third Gottschalk piece Parks has recorded. With strings, piano, accordion, and mandolin, it’s elegant music for a salon of the imagination.

It’s easy to imagine how Hartt found his way to Parks: a 2019 Hartt installation, The Histories (Le Mancenillier), included Gottschalk’s music. A gallery page about The Histories (Old Black Joe) makes clear Hartt’s interest in the relation of the Caribbean to “the broader Americas.” That relation runs through Parks’ music and was the stuff of his second album, Discover America.

The music on sides A and B dates from 1860, 1859, 2021, and the future. The recording, with sleeve art by Hartt, is available from Corbett vs. Demspey and Forced Exposure.

Related reading
All OCA VDP posts (Pinboard)

[Parks produced the Esso Trinidad Steel Band’s eponymous 1971 album for Warner Bros.]

Long, short, short, long

Reading Proust (again), I know to expect long paragraphs. But yesterday’s reading, pages 308–333 in the Penguin Sodom and Gomorrah, still took me by surprise.

First paragraph: 308–318. Second pargraph: 318–319. Third paragraph: 319–321. Fourth paragraph: 321–333.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Zippy Nighthawks

[Zippy, Claude Funston, Griffy, and a naïf in a baseball cap. Zippy, March 7, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

Bill Griffith recently had a week’s worth of Hopper homages, sans Nighthawks. But here it, or they, is, or are, in today’s Zippy.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)