An anniversary worth noting, because it so seldom is: the sinking of the USS Reuben James, now 80 years past to the day.
Still famed in story and especially song, if you’re willing to listen. Illustrated in our time by an unusually thoughtful video. The Weavers did a good version of the song as well.
I heard about Charlie Watts’ passing on the radio today, appropriately, as I was driving my car, in between men telling me more and more useless information that’s supposed to fire my imagination.
Actually, I would have been hard-pressed to name the drummer of the Rolling Stones, in their heyday or their more recent geriatric selves. Which turned out to be Watts the whole time. Not that I dislike the band, just that those kinds of details never captivated me.
“The news comes weeks after it was announced that Watts would miss the band’s U.S. tour dates to recover from an unspecified medical procedure,” the BBC reports. “Watts was previously treated for throat cancer in 2004.”
U.S. tour dates? This far along in the 21st century? Another thing I didn’t know about the Stones. They’ve got staying power, that’s for certain. I expect no one would have predicted such a thing in 1965.
RIP, Mr. Watts.
Warm and windy today. The wind died down some in the evening, and I had a pleasant time sitting on the deck drinking tea and reading. At advanced middle age, these are pleasures you appreciate.
Speaking of an advanced age, I’m glad to see Elvis Costello is still recording catchy tunes. He released an album in October — his 31st — called Hey Clockface, with the title track, “Hey Clockface / How Can You Face Me?” The video is as charming as the song.
He shares writing credit for the song with Fats Waller and Andy Razaf, since it incorporates part of “How Can You Face Me?” Not the sort of music Elvis Costello did 40 years ago when I saw him at VU, but I wouldn’t have appreciated it then anyway.
I left YouTube on autoplay after Waller’s “How Can You Face Me?” and left the room for a few minutes. When I came back, the Bratislava Hot Serenaders were playing, a band I hadn’t heard of before.
A word I hadn’t heard of before.
Clearly a commercial coinage in our time. But who knows? It might evolve over the decades or centuries into something unimaginably perverse.
The U.S. birth rate might be declining, but there are some births. I knew that the Social Security Administration keeps track of baby names, but I didn’t know until recently that the agency maintains a web page devoted to them, new and old.
Not a bad list in 2020, mostly traditional names, such as Olivia, Charlotte, Sophia, Elijah, William and James, rather than some of the trendy names of recent decades, none of which I’ll cite. I’m mossbacked when it comes to a few things, and baby names is one of them.
Another recent vaccination destination was Peoria. We spent about 24 hours on the trip, there in the afternoon and a return the next afternoon. Shortly after taking care of the shot at a local pharmacy, we took a walk along the Illinois River near downtown Peoria, including a paved section but also parkland.
Riverfront Park gives you some nice views of the Murray Baker Bridge, which carries I-74 across the river. It’s named for an early executive of Holt Manufacturing Co., later Caterpillar Tractor Co., who oversaw its move to Peoria in 1909.
For what I took to be a fairly old bridge (opened 1958), it looked spanking new, a handsome example of bridgebuilding. Turns out there was a reason for that.
“After a final countdown the lights were flicked on and the Murray Baker Bridge was re-opened to drivers of Central Illinois,” 25 Week reported on October 31 last year. “The bridge, which was shut down back in March, went through $42 million worth of renovations. Workers replaced the bridge deck, repaired the structural steel, repainted, and fixed the LED lights, which was one of the most anticipated changes.”
North of the bridge is a curiosity called Constitution Garden, dedicated to the U.S. Constitution.
Looks a little unkempt, at least this spring, and the plaque is dark. Someone’s comment on the state of our fundamental law?
Not far away, overlooking the river, is the Dan Fogelberg Memorial, which has been there since 2010. A couple was there when we arrived — a man and woman maybe a few years older than me — and they expressed their enthusiasm for the musician to us, and had me take their picture in front of the rocks. Then they offered to take our picture (Yuriko was elsewhere with the dog.)
I hadn’t realized Fogelberg was from Peoria, but he was. The rock to our left features lyrics from “Part of the Plan,” which I told Ann was one of his better-known songs. Behind me the middle rock had lyrics from “Icarus Ascending,” a song I didn’t know, and to our right the rock says:
Dedicated to the legacy of
Dan Fogelberg
Musician, Singer, Songwriter, Artist
Born in Peoria August 13th
1951 – 2007
With some lines from “River of Souls,” another song I didn’t know. I liked Fogelberg well enough when I heard him on the radio, but I didn’t listen to him much beyond that, except for the album Phoenix (1979), which one of my college roommates had and I listened to occasionally. “Face the Fire” on that album has the distinction of being an anti-nuke song — nuclear power, that is, not bombs, clearly inspired by Three Mile Island.
Its lyrics didn’t make it onto a rock, unsurprisingly, since I suppose “The poison is spreading, the demon is free/People are running from what they can’t even see” wouldn’t have the right vibe for his memorial. More surprising is no mention of “Same Old Land Syne,” considering that’s a Christmastime sentimental favorite on the radio even now.
No question about it, Clarksdale, Mississippi, is a poor Delta town. The median household income in Coahoma County, of which Clarksdale is the seat and only town of any size, is $29,121 as of 2019, according to the Census Bureau, and over 38% of the population lives below the federal poverty level. For all of Mississippi — by household income the poorest state in the union — median household income is just over $45,000, and 19.6% of the population lives in poverty. (The U.S. figures are about $68,700 for median household income, with 10.5% living below the poverty level.)
Coahoma County is also majority black, 77.6%, compared with 37.8% for Mississippi as a whole. Since 2010, the county has lost 15.4% of its population; Mississippi has managed to eke out a 0.3% gain over the same period.
By contrast, Warren County, whose seat is Vicksburg, Mississippi, is considerably more prosperous by the same metrics, though it too lost population in the 2010s: down 6.9%. Median household income is $45,113, just over the state median, and about 20% of the population officially lives in poverty. Black and white are more evenly divided in Warren County, at 49.3% and 48.4%, respectively.
I took a walk around the downtowns of both Clarksdale and Vicksburg on the same day, Sunday, April 11, fairly early in the morning for the former, and late in the afternoon for the latter.
Poor it may be, Clarksdale is distinct as the hub of the Delta blues, a fact that the town very much plays up in the early 21st century, with a museum, music venues, plaques, public artwork and more. Funny, I have a hunch that the city fathers in segregationist Clarksdale a century or so ago didn’t give a fig for the music that the black population was creating and exporting to Chicago and other places.
Few other people were about on that Sunday morning. The first thing that caught my attention was a large mural.
That’s the back wall of the Ground Zero Blues Club, and the mural must be of recent vintage, since a Streetview image from September 2019 shows a few smaller murals, but mostly a blank wall.
That’s hardly the only public artwork in downtown Clarksdale.
The town sports a lot of interesting old buildings in various conditions, some music oriented, some ordinary commercial structures.
One of the music businesses is a place called Deak’s Mississippi Saxophones and Blues Emporium. Not something you’re likely to see anywhere else.
Late that day, I took a walkabout of similar duration in Vicksburg, after visiting the local battlefield.
It’s a larger town with larger buildings, such as The Vicksburg, formerly the Hotel Vicksburg, which I’ve read is the tallest building in town and in recent years an apartment building. Next to it are the Strand Theatre and the B.B. Club, formerly the B’nai B’rith Literary Association building, and now an event venue.
Some smaller structures grace downtown Vicksburg as well, of course.
The city is mostly on a loess bluff overlooking the Mississippi.
Old Man River.
The damage that Old Man River can do, when he’s in the mood. There’s no doubt that 1927 is the one to beat, and not just in Louisiana, though 2011 was a whopper too.
That’s on the river-facing side of the modern floodwall system protecting Vicksburg. On the town-facing side are a lot of different murals. Some details:
My own favorite, “President McKinley Visits the Land of Cotton,” is based on a photo of an arch built from cotton bales to greet the president, who visited for a little less than two hours on May 1, 1901, not long before his date with Death in Buffalo.
If possible, I like to see a presidential site on each trip. That counts as one for the trip.
It’s been a warm week for March so far, even warm enough last night before bed to crack the window a bit and listen to the strong winds and occasional rain showers. Did that account for the occurrence of one of my semiannual phantasmagoria dreams early this morning? Maybe.
Great Fortune, subtitled “The Epic of Rockefeller Center,” by Daniel Okrent (2003) is a delightful book so far, and I’m only a chapter in. Certainly the most delightful thing I’ve ever read about a major urban mixed-use redevelopment project.
The first chapter sets up the story nicely, telling a short history of the Manhattan land that would be Rockefeller Center up until the time that John D. Rockefeller Jr. got involved in the project in the late 1920s. I didn’t know that the parcel had belonged to Columbia University for many years, and the scheme to redevelop the land (known as the Upper Estate) was ultimately driven by the university’s need to pay for its stately campus in Morningside Heights.
“… this meant that expansion on the grand scale of McKim, Mead & White’s Olympian campus on Morningside Heights had somehow to be financed, and the Upper Estate was the only cash cow in sight,” Okrent writes. “The milking commenced in 1904…”
An important person at the beginning of the story is Otto Kahn, multimillionaire financier and patron of the arts (an American Maecenas, back when educated people would have known that reference), who was president and chairman of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera. I didn’t know that he was well enough known that the Marx Brothers parodied him as Roscoe W. Chandler in Animal Crackers.
A digression. Apparently, for $200, one can own an original Otto Kahn letter. Then again, they aren’t rare. Okrent called his correspondence “oceanic.”
Okrent also writes some good standalone lines: “His [architect Ben Morris] neo-Georgian Union League Club on 37th and Park is probably as close as one can get to the architectural equivalent of a stuffed shirt.”
The other day, I was driving along with Ann and playing with the radio dial as we went. On came “Copacabana.” Hadn’t heard that song a good while, but as I mentioned to Ann, it seemed to be on the radio all the time in 1978.
I thought a bit about it, and it seems remarkable that such a downer of a song was so popular. As a ballad, the entire story is, a woman’s boyfriend is killed in front of her, and psychologically she never recovers.
“Yeah,” Ann said. “But the music is so peppy.”
True enough. There’s also a derivative short story in there somewhere. Maybe the incident and the aftermath from the point of view of Rico. Maybe he was the playboy son of a Fulgencio Batista crony. In his highly publicized murder trial in New York in 1949, his lawyers argued self-defense and he was acquitted.
While walking the dog at Fabbrini Park this week, I noticed a memorial plaque on a bench honoring a man named William “Mr. Bill” X (I forget the last name). Nicknamed Mr. Bill, eh? And what were his last words? Oh Noooooooooooooo!
Of course, like Wile E. Coyote, Mr. Bill couldn’t actually die, just suffer endlessly, which seems a lot more hellish. Still, we celebrate the likes of Mr. Bill. I used to have a Mr. Bill t-shirt, and have photographic evidence to prove it, in as much as photographs prove anything anymore. It’s among the t-shirts I’ve lost over the years, which also includes the Kill ‘Em All, Let God Sort It Out shirt that sported a black beret-wearing skull.
No picturesque sunset today. Not around here, anyway.
From the NWS recently:
WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL NOON CST FRIDAY…
* WHAT… Periods of snow through mid evening with an additional 1 to 2 inches possible. West winds will gust as high as 45 mph this evening, and this will result in significant blowing and drifting snow. The worst conditions are expected this evening.
* WHERE … Portions of north central and northeast Illinois, including the Chicago metro.
Not bad except for the wind. I expect some odd snow shapes in the yard when I go out to shovel in the morning. If only the wind would sculpt the snow into ridges paralleling my driveway, with little in it.
Not likely. Also, where’s that snow-blowing robot? Well, here. Looks like it’s still in beta, though — crowdfunding’s a giveaway — and probably costs a fortune anyway. But there’s always the hard-core solution to accumulated snow. Probably illegal in the suburbs. Something Florida Man might do, expect he’d be hard-pressed to find any snow. Maybe Florida Man’s cousin in the UP would.
What a treasure cave YouTube is. A good thing if you have to be at home, which is the way it would mostly be even during an ordinary February. First, a band that owes much to Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, and they do well with it. I’m sure the luminous Tatiana Eva Marie, the lead singer, must have been influenced by Francophone chanteuses, but I’m too ignorant to know who.
I know nothing about Armenian folk songs. If one of the comments under this video is to be believed, this sweet tune is a song of resistance against the enemies of the Armenian people, and everyone knows who they are.
Old song, young voice: Rachael Price. That’s the case for the other singers as well.
A weekend’s a weekend, and a thing to savor if possible.
Time to dip into the well of presidential significa — don’t call it trivia — for obvious reasons. Much has been made of Joe Biden’s age, for example, and he is indeed the oldest person ever to be sworn into the office, besting his immediate predecessor in that regard as well.
Also, Biden was born before four of his predecessors, as was Ronald Reagan. I recall that once upon a time, Reagan was considered an old man for the job, taking the oath as he did at 69. Time flies, the gerontocracy becomes more robust. Kennedy was born after four of his successors, to look at the other extreme.
Then again, presidents are living longer than ever, along with the general population (well, until very recently). Jimmy Carter has made it to 96, topping that long-time champion of presidential longevity, John Adams, a good while ago now. Biden was just a young pup Senator when Carter was in office.
As of today, Carter has been out of office precisely 40 years, the longest post-presidential span. Herbert Hoover is still number two at 31 years. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama might make it to 40 years: to Jan. 20, 2041 for the former and Jan. 20, 2057 for the latter, but they would be very old men by those dates, 94 for Clinton and 95 for Obama.
Biden’s the first president from Delaware. That state had to wait a long time, considering that it was first state to ratify the Constitution. So far 19 states have been home to various presidents at the time of their election. Twenty-one states have been birthplaces of presidents. Florida Man has never been elected president.
Thus far, 14 presidents were born in the 18th century (ending Dec. 31, 1800, so Millard Fillmore counts), with James Buchanan as the last one; 20 were born in the 19th century, with Dwight Eisenhower the last of those; and 12 so far were born in the 20th century. According to the Constitution, that string has to continue at least until the 2036 election. Still, assuming the office continues as it has, and I certainly hope it does, the first president born in the 21st century may be out there somewhere even now.
And what was it about 1946? Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump were all born that year. There have been a number of other years in which two presidents were born, but that’s the only triple year so far.
I didn’t think it very likely, and sure enough it didn’t happen, but it would have been interesting had Donald Trump resigned in the aftermath of the Capitol Hill insurrection. Just so Mike Pence could beat William Henry Harrison’s record for short time in the office. Also, so that Trump’s term wouldn’t be exactly four years. Eight years, four years, eight years, etc. That’s just not very interesting.
There have never been four presidents in a row who were in office for eight years each. Three in a row, yes. Most recently Clinton-Bush-Obama. Before that, Jefferson-Madison-Monroe. Trump’s loss means four in a row might not happen for quite a while, if ever.
I could go on and on about this. But I’ll end by adding that we’re back up to five living former presidents again, the fifth time that has happened. Because of improved longevity, four of those periods have been recent.
A friend sent me a link to this.
Seems fitting.
Much work these days. Lots going on. Will post again on January 19. The more holidays the better, and I’ll bet — considering the inclinations of the incoming administration — Juneteenth will be a federal holiday before long. Or at least the closest Monday.
Ice crystals on our deck. They didn’t last long. Later came snow, which mostly melted.
To follow Sink the Bismarck!, a taut 1960 British war movie, for contrast I recently watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019), an engaging French love story set just before the Revolution. I haven’t seen many movies as painterly Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
A few weeks ago, before the violent national scrum, we started watching the short series The People vs. OJ Simpson. Top-quality historical fiction. Doesn’t feel historic, just like a good while ago. An increasingly long time ago, more in feeling than strict chronology. When the trial was actually happening, I remember thinking, do I have to hear about that again? Enough time has now passed for the subject to be of some interest.
That said, do I ever feel nostalgic for the ’90s? No. The underappreciated ’70s is more my flavor, and for the exact same uninteresting reason as most people. Nostalgia for one’s youth.
I didn’t know until I read about it a little while ago, but The Great Gatsby is in the public domain now. I could publish 100 words from that book, in order, or maybe reverse order, until I’d gone through the entire book, with the time needed to put the text in my only real cost. I don’t think I’ll do that, but it’s nice to know I could.
The immortal Ella.
A much later version. Recent, in fact, by the highly talented Hot Sardines.
The Hot Sardines’ singing is top notch, but I’m really taken with the animation in the video.
Another recent version by the Speakeasy Three.
Fine harmonies. The video is so stylized that it approaches parody, but doesn’t quite get there. Somehow, that works. Also, am I right in thinking there are celebrity lookalikes in this video? Recent celebrities, not swing-era ones. I don’t care enough about celebrities to find out, but I get that sense.
A site that visit every few months: The Comics Curmudgeon. On Jan 13, he mocks the comic strip Crock, which isn’t hard, but it is hard to be funny while doing it. The writer of the site, Joshua Fruhlinger, pulls it off.
One the characters says to another one, “I can’t wait to meet the blind date you got me. When can I call her?”
“Anytime but the weekends,” the other character says. “That’s the busiest time for blacksmiths.”
Fruhlinger comments: “I was going to go all in on ‘Why is it funny that this woman is a blacksmith,’ but we all know the reason why it’s supposed to be funny: blacksmithery is not a traditional feminine job so can you even imagine going on a date with a woman who would engage in it? What would you even call her? A blacksmithrix? Haw haw! Anyway, that’s stupid, so instead I’m going to focus on something actually puzzling: the assertion that weekends are ‘the busiest time for blacksmiths.’ I guess that’s when most Renn Faires are? Are we dealing with a universe where blacksmiths are a vital part of the everyday economy, making horseshoes and tools and such, or are we in a more modern environment where mass manufactured goods are omnipresent and easy to get, and the only people who go to blacksmiths are weirdos who are obsessed with swords? This is the Crock worldbuilding background that I have a million times more in interest in than I do in Poulet’s love life.”
I’ve started reading American Slavery, American Freedom, subtitled “The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” by Edmund S. Morgan (1975). I’m not far along, but enough to know he’s a good writer. The first chapter is unexpectedly about of Sir Francis Drake in Panama in 1572, but I think I can see where he seems to be going with the narrative, which will get to colonial Virginia before long.
After a cold second half of October, temps have trended warmer in early November. So much so that I had lunch on our deck today, and expect to tomorrow as well. It can’t last. But it’s nice to sit out there and forget about the national hubbub — which I can’t do during my working hours, as paying attention to it as part of my job.
Here’s an article about the House of Tomorrow at Indiana Dunes NP, which we saw last month. A good short read, except for one thing: no date on it, which is a pet peeve of mine. It’s obviously not that old, since it refers to the recent designation of the national park, but you shouldn’t have to rely on internal evidence to date an article.
When I posted about Pounds Hollow Recreation Area a while ago, I forgot to include the short falling leaves video. Here it is.
We’re past peak here in northern Illinois, but some of the trees are still ablaze, and some still wilted yellow-green. Sitting out on the deck was pleasant enough today, except when a leaf-blower kicked to life noisily not far away. Will future generations ponder that leaf blowers were ever a thing? Hope so. As far as leaves go, let ’em stay where they fall on your lawn. They’re nutrition for next year’s grass.
In Shawneetown, Illinois, the new town that is, you can see a memorial erected about 10 years ago. The wave of such memorials, I believe, will continue into the 21st century.
It’s a tribute to the original group of black families who moved from Shawneetown on the river to Shawneetown three miles inland, where they would start life anew, after the devastation caused by the 1937 flood.
It includes a map of the nearby neighborhood and all the names of the black residents who lived there. The other side has a more general black history of Shawneetown, noting that a segregation-era school stood on the site of the memorial, presumably for the black neighborhood’s children, but it doesn’t say that. The school closed in the 1950s.
All a little wordy, but not as prolix as the Norwegian Settlers State Memorial.
Near the memorial is a rectangular gazebo. Without corners. Or is it really a gazebo?
When Ann and I saw the abandoned Texaco station in Old Shawneetown, I asked her if she’d ever heard the Texaco jingle. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but the point of jungles is to bury themselves deep, so it’s coded in my synapses somewhere.
Most Americans my age would know what I meant, but considering that Men Who Wear Texaco Stars are long gone, I didn’t expect her to know. She didn’t.
Later, I showed it to her on YouTube, where it’s a standalone video (and also the grist for truly stupid local TV news).
That made me a little curious myself. When did that jingle first air? As it turns out, 1962, as a snappier tune compared with, for example, what the singing Men With Texaco Stars did for Milton Berle 10 years earlier. The jingle was also incorporated into later Texaco songs, such as this one sung by Ethel Merman.
As jingles go, “You Can Trust Your Car” is memorable indeed. The story of the copywriter (and composer) who came up with it, one Roy Eaton, is even more remarkable. Aside from being a talented concert pianist, he was the first black creative at a major ad agency, joining Young & Rubicam in 1955 and later working for many years at Benton & Bowles, before founding his own company. He’s still alive at 90.
So memorable that it was the basis for an anachronism in a 1977 episode of M*A*S*H (see the trivia section at the bottom of the page).
The Ricki Lee Jones song “Last Chance Texaco” (1979) includes an example of a reference — to the jingle — that was perfectly understandable when the work was new, and perfectly mystifying to later generations.
Your last chance
To trust the man with the star
You’ve found the last chance Texaco
One more Texaco fact: John W. “Bet A Million” Gates was an early investor in the ancestor company of Texaco.