Mark, huh?
For weeks now the artwork in Mark Trail has been a bit odd.
Orange Crate Art
A Mirado jingle?
“Stays sharp for pages!”
Letters, now
In the time of the coronavirus, Lynell George suggests writing letters.
Jimmy Cobb (1929–2020)
The drummer and last surviving musician from Miles Davis’s 1959 recording Kind of Blue.
Memorial Day
A Gordon Parks photograph, 1943.
John Pavlovitz on how to grieve
“You wear a mask at the damn grocery store and you wash your hands and you keep your distance and you show kindness to cashiers — and you follow the simple rules put in place to keep people healthy and alive because that’s what decent human beings do.”
A memorial day
“An incalculable loss”: the front page of today’s New York Times.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Heliophilic jazz alias.”
Shakespeare as Dickinson
William Shakespeare’s sonnet 73 in the manner of Emily Dickinson, something I wrote in 2003 for a poetry class I was teaching.
Recently updated
A post about Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado, now with photographs of the Bronx bar and its owner.
A “lethal aversion to reading”
“It's not a stretch to say that if the president read, thousands of lives might have been saved”: in The Week, Windsor Mann writes about Donald Trump*’s “lethal aversion to reading.”
JEffrey or LEgal
From The Hidden Eye (dir. Richard Whorf, 1945). Duncan “Mac” Maclain (Edward Arnold), a blind detective, stands outside the door to the Neptone Hair Tonic Co., listens carefully as someone dials a telephone, and later works out the details.
EXchange name sightings
Exchange names come into their own in Fallen Angel (dir. Otto Preminger, 1945).
Background of backgrounds
Obelisk? Check. Statuary? Check? Skulls? Rocket? Skeleton? Check, check, and check. Dr. William Haseltine has the background of backgrounds.
Schwan’s Dinners
That logo for Mike Pompeo’s so-called Madison Dinners: where had I seen something like it? On the side of a Schwan’s truck.
Old and new bookmarks
The old one, a DO-NOT-USE-AS-BOOKMARK bookmark, made it through five years of the Four Seasons Reading Club. The new one is a legit bookmark, from Three Lives & Company.
A notebook sighting
From Sleeping Car to Trieste (dir. John Paddy Carstairs, 1948).
Never too early, never too late
From Sleeping Car to Trieste (dir. John Paddy Carstairs, 1948): “Won’t you join me in a Scotch?”
Sunshine Hydrox
Hydrox was made by Sunshine Bakers, delivering “light inside the body” with every delicious bite.
Internet rising
Yeast!
Drugs and their effects
“A new test of the drug hydroxychloroquine suggests that it may cause delusions, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned on Monday.”
Ken Osmond (1943–2020)
AKA Eddie Haskell.
Another “Molambo”
Homemade music.
“There’s no dying in art”
Sonny Rollins: “Humans and materialism die. But there’s no dying in art.”
Augustin Hadelich at NPR
From NPR, a Tiny Desk Concert, with Augustin Hadelich, violin, and Kuang-Hao Huang, piano. Music by John Adams, Antonín Dvořák, and Josef Suk.
Nonbelief and belief
A passage from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet.
Graduation 2020
Barack Obama addresses high-school students.
Meltdown
From the Financial Times, an utterly damning summary of the Trump* administration’s response to pandemic.
Nancy distancing
Social distancing in the comics.
“Infinite rocks”
In today’s Zippy, way too many rocks.