"He went back to his desk and finished his column, then started for the park. He sat down on a bench near the obelisk to wait for Mrs. Doyle. Still thinking of tents, he examined the sky and saw that it was canvas-colored and ill-stretched. He examined it like a stupid detective who is searching for a clue to his own exhaustion. When he found nothing, he turned his trained eye on the skyscrapers that menaced the little park from all sides. In their tons of forced rock and tortured steel, he discovered what he thought was a clue.

Americans have dissipated their racial energy in an orgy of stone breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians. And they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost as if they knew that the stones would some day break them."

- Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts, 1933.

Images from here. 

- Mitchell Jamieson, "Ladders", 1964, from here. This is one of a series of paintings and sketches of the American space effort which originated from a suggestion by James Webb, NASA's administrator from 1961-1968 (those heady years), that artists might turn their collective attentions to mankind's lunar strivings. From the National Air and Space Museum: 

"Working together, James Dean, a young artist employed by the NASA Public Affairs office, and Dr. H. Lester Cooke, curator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, created a program that dispatched artists to NASA facilities with an invitation to paint whatever interested them. The result was an extraordinary collection of works of art proving, as one observer noted, "that America produces not only scientists and engineers capable of shaping the destiny of our age, but also artists worthy to keep them company."

And the hope is not false...

"But, despite all the vocational advisers, the pamphlets pointing out to them what good money you can earn if you invest in some solid technical training - pharmacology, let's say, or accountancy, or the varied opportunities offered by the vast field of electronics - there are still, incredibly enough, quite a few of them who persist in writing poems, novels, plays!... Here in their midst, George feels a sort of vertigo. Oh God, what will become of them all? What chance have they? Ought I to yell out to them, right now, here, that it's hopeless?

But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real."

- from Christopher Isherwood's wonderful A Single Man, 1964.

Mingus, Haynes, Monk, and Parker. From here. 

"The sunset at the window competed in brilliance with the Van Goghs and the Gauguins. The sun burned like a fire ship on the water, sinking slowly till only a red smoke was left trailing up the sky. A fishing boat was headed into the harbor, black and small against the enormous west. Above its glittering wake a few gulls whirled like sparks which had gone out."

- Ross Macdonald, Black Money, 1965.

From here

- the genius of modern jazz plays Bach, from The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 3, 1957. 

photo from here. 

"Then Roach, Morrison, and I and the boy went out on to the terrasse with the panorama splendide in the late twilight and pulled up chairs around a couple of tables. The clarinetist put his feet up on his table, tilted his chair back, and announced that he was going to play "Dans l'Ambiance" - or, as he translated it, "Een de Mud." Then he lifted the clarinet to his lips and played "In the Mood"... [it] sounded better than any other music I've ever heard. The clarinet gloated over the routed Ostrogoths. The thin sound, wriggling up toward the old Tower, woke birds that had turned in for the night. M. Bertrand's son, a slight youth of eighteen, said the Germans had disapproved of jazz, regarding an interest in it as evidence of Allied sympathies, and had forbidden it to be played  in public places. The zazous, or hepcats, however, were not discouraged by this from playing at dances but, instead, amused themselves by working out musical arrangements that began as Viennese waltzes, then switched to jazz and back again before any Germans present could call  the turn. The zazous also affected le genre jazz in their clothes, the Bertrand boy said; they wore what Americans call zoot suits. There was nothing much l'Occupant could do about that."

- A.J. Liebling, Normandy Revisited, 1955.

Man's Urge to Power

"In the State, as in the Church, in waging war upon treason on the one hand and heresy on the other, torture was admitted to be the most powerful instrument available. It is, although any practical expressions are hidden and camouflaged in a thousand ways, the most powerful instrument available to-day. Because of this basic fact, torture has always been existent in some form or other, and, in the course of the world's history, has made spectacular and sporadic emergencies, which, in themselves, have been partly instrumental in distracting attention from those forms of persecution which have been continually present since the beginning of man's urge to power, and which are existent in our own time....The masses hate anything which they do not understand and at the same time cannot ignore, or which is repugnant to their wishes or tastes. They even hate those who tell the truth, because they do not want to know the truth. The burning of a great national newspaper during the war of 1914-1918, for telling an unpalatable truth, was a gesture as psychologically significant as the burning of the witches in the Middle Ages."

- George Riley Scott, A History of Torture, 1940.

Early Deaths of Jazz Musicians Part IV

Doug Watkins died in an automobile accident at 27 years old on February 5, 1962. Traveling from Arizona to California to meet Philly Joe Jones for a gig, he fell asleep and crashed into an oncoming truck. Strangely, Watkins was a cousin by marriage to Paul Chambers, who likewise was from Detroit, likewise played the bass, and likewise died young. Watkins was among the crop of Detroit musicians that included Milt Jackson, Hank, Thad, and Elvin Jones, Donald Byrd, and Tommy Flanagan that made such an indelible and profound mark on '50s jazz. Watkins would have been the cream of any city's crop. His tone tended to be unassuming yet virile, sometimes reaching towards something beautiful or discovering someplace unforeseen. Watkins' most memorable recording might be "Saxophone Colossus", possibly the best album to come out of Prestige, in which, it might be said, his audacious poise provides a counterpoint to Rollins' tremendous ferocity of invention.

 The aptly titled "Fin de l'affaire" with Hank Mobley, Art Farmer, Horace Silver, and Art Blakey, 1957:

"The prix fixe, at sixteen francs, comprised a choice of soup or a spectacular hors d'oeuvre varié and then fish, entrée, vegetable, salad, and cheese and fruit or dessert. Wine was included, but coffee wasn't. The franc was twenty-five to the dollar."

- A.J. Liebling on eating at the Taverne Soufflet in Paris in 1926. From Normandy Revisited, 1955.