Jeff Bezos citing Warren Buffett
Posted: September 15, 2012 Filed under: advice, writing Leave a comment
From this old Fast Company article (worth reading). Bezos is talking about getting investors who understand Amazon is playing a long-term strategy. But of course it goes beyond:
“With respect to investors, there’s a great Warren Buffettism,” he says. “You can hold a rock concert and that can be successful, and you can hold a ballet and that can be successful, but don’t hold a rock concert and advertise it as a ballet.”
Some Paintings Mentioned in “The Last Samurai” by Helen DeWitt
Posted: September 13, 2012 Filed under: painting Leave a comment
Highly recommended, this book has no connection at all to the Tom Cruise film of the same name. It’s 1000x better. It’s about a child genius in London. A painting the child sees in the book:
Odysseus Deriding Polyphemus, by J. M. Turner, 1829:
Wikipedia on Turner:
He died in the house of his mistress Sophia Caroline Booth in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea on 19 December 1851. He is said to have uttered the last words “The sun is God” before expiring.
More to come??
(found the image here).
Someday My Prince Will Come
Posted: September 10, 2012 Filed under: California, music Leave a comment
Recently we were invited by a correspondent to test-listen to some new speakers. It had been a long time since “listening to music” was the whole activity we were doing. Among other things we tried out this Miles Davis album, recorded March 7, 20, 21st of 1961.
During the next session, while Miles was about to wrap up “Someday My Prince Will Come,” John Coltrane suddenly appeared in the studio between two sets at the Apollo Theater where he was performing.
So says milesdavis.com, which continues (demonstrating why reading about jazz is associated with being a huge douche-out):
In two choruses,Coltrane conveyed the quintessence of his art. The next day he returned bringing, forthe last time, the intensity of his flame to the music of Miles, who in “Teo,” took advantage of his presence to extend the modal explorations of “Flamenco Sketches” even further.
Anyway. The following anecdote was once reported in The Guardian:
In 1987, [Davis] was invited to a White House dinner by Ronald Reagan. Few of the guests appeared to know who he was. During dinner, Nancy Reagan turned to him and asked what he’d done with his life to merit an invitation. Straight-faced, Davis replied: “Well, I’ve changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fuck the president?”
Snopes however tells us it wasn’t so, and quotes Davis’ own autobiography, where he wrote:
Reagan was nice to us, respectful and everything. But Nancy is the one who has the charm between those two. She seemed like a warm person. She greeted me warmly and I kissed her hand. She liked that.
Too bad.
What a great album cover. That’s Miles’ then-wife Frances. According to a message board we came across, she was working as a hostess at Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Blvd. as of 2004.
She’s still beautiful and has the body of a dancer. Totally charming woman… She seemed totally open about who she is and her past with Miles and would probably be happy to chat with anyone about it should they stop by the restaurant.
Hamburger Hamlet is now closed.
Lionel Pries
Posted: September 9, 2012 Filed under: architecture, California, pictures Leave a commentReading up on some Disney animators and writers.
Ken Anderson, one of the credited screenwriters for The Rescuers, Aristocats, The Jungle Book, and Cinderella, was (wikipedia tells me) “particularly influenced” by his University of Washington architecture professor, Lionel Pries.
Lionel Pries designed the Andalucia building in Santa Barbara:
Here’s a house he designed for himself:
“He used affordable modern materials — concrete, concrete block and cement-asbestos board.”
Here’s another house Pries designed, in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Seattle:
Wikipedia:
Pries was gay, but deeply closeted in the University of Washington community. He anticipated teaching at least until he reached retirement age, but was forced to resign his university position in 1958 after he was picked up in a vice sting in Los Angeles. The reason for Pries’s abrupt departure from the university was concealed at the time.
Pries worked as a drafter until he was able to retire in 1964, then lived quietly until his death in 1968.
Lionel Pries:
(Pries photo is credited to Dorothy Conway and the Pries Collection, Special Collection, UW Libraries, Pries house photo to Charles R. Pierson from the same collection, Laurelhurst house photo “courtesy Max and Helen Gurvitch, and I got them all from this Seattle Times article by Laurence Kriesman.)
Headshot of an opera star I discovered on an Internet ramble which will now haunt my dreams.
Posted: September 3, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
“Hello. I want to be near you. Forever.”
John Cage
Posted: September 3, 2012 Filed under: California, music Leave a comment
Tyler Cowen talks about John Cage today, as what would be his 100th is coming up. His quotes link doesn’t include my favorite. Possibly apocryphal, I believe I got it from the Paris Review interview of Sam Shepard which I am WAY too busy to reread right now:
Theater exists all around us and it is the purpose of formal theater to remind us.
I told that quote to the actor friend I thought would most appreciate it and even he kinda scoffed.
Couple curios from Cage’s wikipedia page:
On his education at Pomona:
I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.
And:
After several months in Paris, Cage’s enthusiasm for America was revived after he read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – he wanted to return immediately, but his parents, with whom he regularly exchanged letters during the entire trip, persuaded him to stay in Europe for a little longer and explore the continent.
Whose parents ever did that?
He went to Santa Monica, California, where he made a living partly by giving small, private lectures on contemporary art.
What? Who paid for that? How much? Sounds like something PON might get away with:
Cage was working at his mother’s arts and crafts shop, where he met artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff. She was an Alaskan-born daughter of a Russian priest; her work encompassed fine bookbinding, sculpture and collage. Although Cage was involved in relationships with Don Sample and with architect Rudolph Schindler’s wife Pauline when he met Xenia, he fell in love immediately.
Well, yeah. An Alaskan-born daughter of a Russian priest walks in, introduces herself as Xenia, and starts talking bookbinding, it’s Robyn time.
Cage met [Allen] Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with George Segal and invited him to join his class.
That’s from the chapter of the wiki called ’60s: FAME
Lon Chaney’s Cabin
Posted: August 29, 2012 Filed under: California, celebrity, heroes Leave a comment
High in the Sierras, the cabin of actor Lon Chaney, Sr., “the man of a thousand faces.”
Both of Chaney’s parents were deaf, and as a child of deaf adults Chaney became skilled in pantomime.
From this LA Times article:
“Tonight I start out for the High Sierra. No shaving, no makeup, no interviews for four long, lazy weeks. We take a stove along and the wife cooks the fish I catch. We sleep under the pines and I try to climb high enough to reach the snows. Camping’s the biggest kick in life for me,” Chaney told a writer in 1928.
And:
The Forest Service considered destroying the cabin to comply with the 1964 Wilderness Act, which calls for the restoration of natural conditions in wilderness areas. But the agency changed its mind when it became clear that the amount of dynamite required to demolish the massive stone structure would cause major damage to the surrounding trees.
Good one from The Atlantic’s tribute to Neil Armstrong
Posted: August 27, 2012 Filed under: heroes, photography 2 Comments
“Astronaut John Young, Frank Borman and Neil Armstrong with Deke Slayton, during astronaut desert survival training near Reno, Nevada, in 1964.”
Logging Bunkhouse Interior, ca. 1895
Posted: August 24, 2012 Filed under: photography Leave a commentfrom the University of Washington’s “Industries and Occupations” photograph collection.
View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow – Thomas Cole, 1836
Posted: August 24, 2012 Filed under: New York, painting Leave a comment
go over to the Met and see it big.
Cole learned the rudiments of his profession from a wandering portrait painter named Stein
The fourth-highest peak in the Catskills is named after Thomas Cole:
From my cuz.
Posted: August 23, 2012 Filed under: advice Leave a comment
what a ruling champion of life.
I saw my own future!
Posted: August 22, 2012 Filed under: New England, writing Leave a comment
(I should be so lucky. E. B. White, via Letters of Note)
John le Carré
Posted: August 21, 2012 Filed under: writing Leave a comment
INTERVIEWER
It has been said the book [Tailor of Panama] mirrors what you feel about England at the moment.
LE CARRÉ
While abroad, I don’t want to talk gloomily about my country. I’ve become interested recently not in the macro-interpretation of my country, but the micro-interpretation. I live in a tiny, desolate part of England, where the real effects of what I see as terrible misgovernment—central misgovernment—can be felt in detail upon agriculture, fishing, communication, and transport, all of those things. My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. What I see in my country, progressively over these years, is that the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, and the poorer have become hopeless because they’re not properly cared for. That’s actually something that is happening in many Western societies. Your own, I am told, is not free from it.
(Paris Review again, picture I found here credited to Jonathan Player of Rex Features)
Vincent Thomas Bridge
Posted: August 20, 2012 Filed under: California Leave a comment
On October 26, 1990, 1964 Olympic diving bronze medalist Larry Andreasen was killed jumping from the west tower of the bridge in an attempt to set a diving record.
Wandering vs. staying put
Posted: August 20, 2012 Filed under: adventures Leave a comment
[TOBIAS] WOLFF
I had an idea of myself as someone free and unencumbered, and virtuous for being so. Of course, one cannot live like this— I can’t, anyway. And in fact, I find that all the best things in my life have come about precisely through the things that hold me in place: family, work, routine, everything that contradicts my old idea of the good life. For years I lived mostly out of a backpack, traveling light and living cheap, often bestowing my mendicant presence on my brother, Geoffrey, and his wife, Priscilla, on my patient friends. But, you know, it seems as time goes on that the deepest good for me as man and writer is to be found in ordinary life. It’s the gravity of daily obligations and habit, the connections you have to your friends and your work, your family, your place— even the compromises that are required of you to get through this life. The compromises don’t diminish us, they humanize us—it’s the people who won’t, or who think they don’t, who end up monsters in this world. I’m not talking about dishonesty, I’m talking about having some give, sometimes letting go of things that you aren’t inclined to let go of, that you may even have attached the name of principle to, to justify your fear of bending.
(Tobias in the Paris Review, picture from the collection of the blogger)
Automatic Dumper, Jack Delano, 1943
Posted: August 15, 2012 Filed under: California, pictures Leave a comment
from Library of Congress
Selling the Aga Cooker
Posted: August 14, 2012 Filed under: heroes, writing Leave a commentHere’s Swedish inventor Gustaf Dalen:
Gustaf Dalen lost his sight in an explosion while developing his earlier invention, a porous substrate for storing gases, Agamassan. Forced to stay at home, Dalen discovered that his wife was exhausted by cooking. Although blind, he set out to develop a new stove that was capable of a range of culinary techniques and easy to use.
His invention was the AGA cooker:
In the 1920s these were sold, door to door, in the UK. And the greatest AGA cooker salesman of all was David Ogilvy:
His success at this marked him out to his employer, who asked him to write an instruction manual, The Theory and Practice of Selling the AGA cooker, for the other salesmen. Thirty years later, Fortune magazine editors called it the finest sales instruction manual ever written.
I went looking for this manual, and found it at Patrick Lannigan’s blog. I make sure to link because Patrick Lannigan reports that “I’d have to say my number one obsession is playing with Google rankings.” I wish him well.
Anyway, Ogilvy has some good writing and interesting advice:
Salesmen are only too often unpopular people in Aga-worthy houses.. Show straight away that you are not of the so-called canvasser variety. Never bully, get into an argument, show resentment, or lose your temper. Do not talk about “your husband” – “Mr. Smith” is less impertinent.
Never talk down or show superior knowledge. Never appeal to a prospect’s pity because the more prosperous you appear the more she is likely to be impressed with you and to believe in you and your Aga.
The worst fault a salesman can commit is to be a bore. Foster any attempt to talk about other things; the longer you stay the better you get to know the prospect, and the more you will be trusted. Pretend to be vastly interested in any subject the prospect shows an interest in. The more she talks the better, and if you can make her laugh you are several points up. If she argues a lot, do not give the impression of knowing all the answers by heart and always being one up on her. She will think you are too smart by half, and mistrust your integrity. Find out as soon as possible in the conversation how much she already knows about Aga; it will give you the correct angle of approach. Perhaps the most important thing of all is to avoid standardisation in your sales talk. If you find yourself on fine day saying the same things to a bishop and a trapezist, you are done for.
When the prospect tries to bring the interview to a close, go gracefully. It can only hurt to be kicked out. Learn to recognise a really valid reason for the prospect being unable to order (there are mighty few such reasons). With these reservations you cannot be too tenacious or too persevering. The good salesman combines the tenacity of a bull dog with the manners of a spaniel. If you have any charm, ooze it.
The more prospects you talk to, the more sales you expose yourself to, the more orders you will get. But never mistake the quantity of calls for quality of salesmanship.
Later, in the “Attack” section:
Learn to recognise vegetarians on sight. It is painful indeed to gush over roasting and grilling to a drooping face which has not enjoyed the pleasures of a beefsteak for years.
From the section “Wise-cracking”:
The longer you talk to a prospect, the better, and you will not do this if you’re a bore. Pepper your talk with anecdote and jokes. Accumulate a repertoire of illustration. Above all, laugh till you cry every time the prospect makes the joke about the Aga Khan. A deadly serious demonstration is bound to fail. If you can’t make a lady laugh, you certainly cannot maker buy.
David Ogilvy might be better than Mystery.
The Los Angeles Basin
Posted: August 13, 2012 Filed under: California Leave a comment
(wikipedia via Landsat)
Bob Ross
Posted: August 7, 2012 Filed under: art, painting 2 CommentsAfter enjoying this video:
I did a typically cursory investigation into his backstory:
Ross enlisted in the U.S. Air Force at age 18 after graduating from Elizabeth Forward High School in Elizabeth, Pennsylvania and was living in Florida early in his military career when the Air Force transferred him to Eielson AFB (in Alaska), where he first saw the snow and mountains that later became recurring themes in his artwork; he developed his quick-painting technique in order to be able to create art for sale in brief daily work breaks. Having held military positions that required him to be, in his own words, “mean” and “tough”, “the guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late to work”, Ross decided that if he ever moved on from the military, “it wasn’t going to be that way any more”, “vowing never to scream again.”
Helytimes 