OS X hidden gems

“Have you ever noticed that little dark circle that appears within the close button of a document window in OS X when you have unsaved changes? Yeah, me neither.”

(via Minimal Mac)

Van Dyke Parks in Portland

Van Dyke Parks plays Portland, Oregon, February 10, 2010. Says he, “I’ve decided to go out and flog a lifetime of unpromoted song.”

Eve Shea remembers J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger, in a letter to Eve Shea:

I’m cheerless at weddings, but almost entirely, wholly, and I’m convinced it’s not a bad idea at all to spare people I like the sight of me standing around, mostly mute, with a drink I don’t want in my hand.

Shea met Salinger in 1977, when she was thirteen. They were very occasional correspondents for fourteen years. Read more:

Goodbye Uncle Jerry (The Globe and Mail)

Clark Terry’s Lifetime Achievement Award

Trumpeter and flugelhornist Clark Terry is one of seven musicians receiving Lifetime Achievement Awards today from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. The other honorees: Leonard Cohen, Bobby Darin, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Michael Jackson, Loretta Lynn, and André Previn.

I was lucky to do a radio interview with Clark Terry some years ago, when I was putting in two hours a week playing jazz at my university’s FM station. (The station then aired four hours of classical music and five hours of jazz a day, with bluegrass, blues, hip-hop, indie rock, and reggae in the evenings. Now the station plays “hits.”) Clark was on campus to lead a workshop and perform, and had agreed to come over to the station in the afternoon for an interview. He and I talked for an hour on the air. I consider that hour one the most memorable experiences in my life: the opportunity to talk not only with a great musician but with a great Ellingtonian. It was a really good interview. The interviewer, as you might imagine, had done his homework.

The Grammy Awards air tomorrow night on CBS, 8:00 Eastern Time. I hope that the Lifetime Achievement awardees get more than just a perfunctory roll call. We’ll see.

Related reading
Clark Terry’s website
NARAS press release

5 sentences about life on the moon

The Google search 5 sentences about life on the moon brought someone to my post on five sentences from Bleak House. Sorry, wrong orb. But I’ll bite:

Moon: life on the, five sentences about

(The moon. MR. and MRS. JOHNNY BURKE sit at a table. They wear evening clothes. A SERVING MAN stands to one side.)

MR. BURKE
    Moon life becomes you. It goes with your hair.
    You certainly know the right thing to wear.

MRS. BURKE
    Actually, I’m freezing.

SERVING MAN
    Would anyone care for more cheese?

[The first three sentences, more or less, are borrowed from the 1942 song “Moonlight Becomes You,” words by Johnny Burke, music by Jimmy Van Heusen.]

Related posts
Five sentences about clothes
Five sentences for smoking
Five sentences on the ship

Lawn, goodbye (Hi and Lois)

There seems to be a new person working the line at Hi-Lo Amalgamated. Interstice problems — the changing door, the changing greenery, the disappearing picture — are the same old same old. What’s new: the Flagstons’ front door now opens onto the sidewalk. Lawn, goodbye, for now.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

J.D. Salinger (1919–2010)

J.D. Salinger has died.

Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

The New York Times reports that there will be no service.

A P.S. 131 class picture, 1966–1967

[Click for a larger view.]

The above photograph shows Mrs. Marcia Schorr’s fifth-grade class, P.S. 131, Boro Park, Brooklyn, New York, 1966–1967. Not a cross tie in the crowd.

I remember Mrs. Schorr as very capable, very calm. The envelope that holds my fifth-grade report card holds a note from her to my dad (on a note-card, in an envelope, of course), thanking him for a card he had made for her. Mrs. Schorr was wishing us well on leaving the city for New Jersey: “Brooklyn will be losing a fine family!” What a gracious and generous thing to say.

As a kid, I liked the effect that the horrible lighting had on the boys in the top row: it gave them long hair. Looking at this photograph now, I wonder whether Albert’s shirt pocket (third row, middle) was holding what we called an I.D. wallet. Such wallets were accessories in our work as school-aged secret agents in The Black Cat Club. (Secret agents always carry I.D., right?) And I now remember something I haven’t thought of in years: a lunch hour during which Donald (top row, left) and I stood on safety patrol and I told him what menstruation was. My mom and dad believed in reality-based parenting — no birds, no bees, no storks.

That concludes class pictures at Orange Crate Art. In the suburbs of New Jersey, all school pictures were of individual students. So the class picture was a set of separate little rectangles on a white background, young suburbanites each with her or his own little bit of property.

[I’m uneasy about identifying fellow fifth-graders by last name without permission, so I haven’t. These photographs have faded and remain so here, as unimproved scans. I’m the kid in the second row, left, looking rather short.]

More from the P.S. 131 collection
1962–1963 1963–1964 1964–1965 1965–1966

A P.S. 131 class picture, 1965–1966

[Click for a larger view.]

The above photograph shows Miss Carol D’Elia’s fourth-grade class, P.S. 131, Boro Park, Brooklyn, New York, 1965–1966. Miss D’Elia was my favorite elementary school teacher. She was kind and smart and beautiful. She sometimes wore little white boots. (I would’ve sworn she was wearing them in this photograph.) Hullabaloo boots, everyone called them, after the television show. See how many girls in this picture are rocking a pair of boots? I would like to imagine that Miss D’Elia was for the girls in our class an exciting exemplar of intelligence and style. “But Mom, Miss D’Elia wears them!”

Miss D’Elia was the first teacher to let me know that she liked me, that she thought I was a good person. Her arm around Eddie (for that was his name) says much about her feeling for her students. Eddie must’ve felt like a million dollars.

At some point in that school year, Miss D’Elia became Mrs. Corso. Her students and their families were invited to the wedding. I remember shaking Mr. Corso’s hand. Mr. Corso was a lucky man.

[I’m uneasy about identifying fellow fourth-graders by last name without permission, so I haven’t. These photographs have faded and remain so here, as unimproved scans. I’m the kid sitting on the left.]

More from the P.S. 131 collection
1962–1963 1963–1964 1964–1965 1966–1967

A P.S. 131 class picture, 1964–1965

[July 2020: There’s new information about Mrs. Vistreich at the end of the post.]


[Click for a larger view.]

See? Little ladies and gentlemen, every one of us. Still our teacher is not satisfied. She turns to principal I.O. Gimprich. Why me? she asks. Just because, says Dr. Gimprich, climbing a wall, just out of the picture.

The above photograph shows Mrs. Roslyn Vistreich’s third-grade class, P.S. 131, Boro Park, Brooklyn, New York, 1964–1965. Mrs. Vistreich was not my favorite teacher, nor I her favorite pupil. She called me a clock-watcher — at 2:58 or 2:59, if you can believe it, which you should, because it’s true, I think. She called me Mr. Dooley, perhaps a diss of my Irish-American ancestry. She didn’t like my habit of whistling (melodies, not wolf calls). She charged me — on my report card — with being a danger to myself and my classmates: “Must try to walk up & down stairs more carefully to avoid accidents to self and others.” Yet she sent me off during class time to travel from floor to floor delivering notes to other teachers. I read the notes and found out her first name.

I once told a joke about Schaefer beer in Mrs. Vistreich’s class. Surely it confirmed whatever she already thought of me. But still, I “did good.” Under the words “Our Best Work” is my report “Building Materials.” It’s the one in the middle, the work of a tileman’s kid.

Do click for a larger view and enjoy the props on the desks, which I don’t think were standard in class pictures. Look at the MacBook on Barry’s desk. How’d that get there?

*

July 21, 2020: There was much more to Mrs. Vistreich’s life than met my third-grade eye. Here’s a story that features Fernand Vistreich, the man who became my teacher’s husband in 1964. For the unacknowledged source, see an article in the January 29, 1948 Daily News: “Doc Denies Consulting in Shorts.” The later Herbert Gehr story, with no Vistreich connection, is told in three New York Times articles: “Wife Seeking Data for Divorce Killed,” “Gehr Weeps As Trial Is Told of Shooting,” and “Gehr Is Acquitted in Slaying of Wife.”

[I’m uneasy about identifying fellow third-graders by last name without permission, so I haven’t. These photographs have faded and remain so here, as unimproved scans. I’m the kid with the blue shirt and necktie.]

More from the P.S. 131 collection
1962–1963 1963–1964 1965–1966 1966–1967