The composer and pianist Carla Bley has died at the age of eighty-seven. From The New York Times obituary:
She was branded an avant-gardist early in her career, but that term applied more to her slyly subversive attitude than to the formal character of her music, which always maintained a place for tonal harmony and standard rhythm.Ever heard of? Never heard of? Try her composition “Lawns.” Here is a 2018 trio performance, with Bley, Andy Sheppard, tenor; and Steve Swallow, electric bass.
My copy of Katherine Mansfield’s Stories (1956) is stamped with the owners’ names and address — three times, like a library book. So I looked up the names and found obituaries for Terry and Judy Horowitz. Their name for their Maryland house, included on the stamp: Elysium.
The family is moving. A child enters the old house one last time.
Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude” (1918).
One could learn a lot about how to describe from reading Katherine Mansfield. In 2015 Steven Millhauser named Mansfield’s Stories as one of his six favorite collections of short fiction. I wonder if his attention to the effects of light owes something to her work.
Also from Katherine Mansfield
“Tortoiseshell cats and champagne”
[Two O’Clock Courage (dir. Anthony Mann, 1945). Click for a larger view.]
Ted “Step” Allison (Tom Conway) staggers away from the camera as the movie begins. It’s a good not great noir. I gave it three stars.
The cinematographer: Jack MacKenzie, whose first screen credit was in 1916 and whose last was in 1963 — on Leave It to Beaver.
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A reader noticed the similarity to the opening credits for Mad Men:
Coincidence? Perhaps. But gosh is the composition similar. If it’s not a matter of coincidence, the similarity is certainly not meant to be recognized. Two O’Clock Courage is not a well-known movie.
For iPhone users: did you know that you can use Siri to add events to Calendar? Here’s an official Apple page that explains. I discovered this possibility on my own by saying “Add to calendar” to see what would happen.
If you find, as I do, that adding an event to Calendar by hand, on the spot, is incredibly tedious, voice is a welcome alternative.
[I am still an analog kind of guy — with a pocket Moleskine planner — but I like the redundancy of having events on the phone.]
Blues news from The Washington Post : the Smithsonian is revealing more materials from Mack McCormick’s archive of recordings and writings, aka “The Monster.”
Related posts
Icicles, shrimp, and tamales :
Mack McCormick’s Robert Johnsons
From Jillian Hess’s Noted, a Substack devoted to notebooks and note-taking: James Baldwin’s outlines and doodles.
Related reading
Some OCA James Baldwin posts (Pinboard)
The news I woke up to: in a Chicago suburb, a seventy-one-year-old man killed a six-year-old boy and wounded the boy’s mother because they were Muslim.
