RIP

[y66]

Gene Littler, Golfer With a Gorgeous Swing

 

 

From Successor to Hogan? by Herbert Warren Wind (1955):

 

Not since Sam Snead came out of the mountains and joined the tour in the winter of 1937 has any young professional so captivated the interest and imagination of the American sports public as Gene Littler, the soft-spoken, sensible, self-possessed young man from La Jolla, Calif., who so far this season has taken the Los Angeles and Phoenix Opens and generally dominated the first month and a half of the 1955 winter circuit. When Snead broke through to win the Oakland Open shortly after leaving West Virginia, he was such a rank unknown that the newspapers and wire services spelled the unfamiliar name Sneed. And, of course, there was Sam's unforgettable comment when he was shown the photograph of himself accompanying the New York Times's account of his victory: "How'd they ever git mah picture? I ain't never been to New York."

AN UNOSTENTATIOUS PREDICTION

 

Littler's superb talents, on the other hand, have been clearly perceived by people close to golf for quite some time now, and though there are sports pundits who week after week make like they have "discovered" him, it was at least two years ago that Johnny Dawson of the Thunderbird Club in Palm Springs unostentatiously predicted that Littler had the game and the temperament to succeed Ben Hogan as the country's greatest golfer.

 

At the time Dawson made this prognosis, Littler—who still looks like a Wheaties ad subject who grew up and whose appeal is certainly enhanced by his boy-next-door appearance—was 22, serving in the Navy, and although the possessor of an impressive record in California competition, a mystery man to most golf fans east of Yuma. A lot of us got our first look at the young amateur late in the summer of 1953 when he was a member of the American Walker Cup team which met and defeated a good British side at Kittansett near Cape Cod. What we saw was the soundest natural golf swing since the days of the young Snead. (To digress briefly, Snead is the only golfer who had any influence whatsoever on the development of Littler's swing. When Sam was stationed at San Diego during the war, Littler had the opportunity to watch and study his method.) During the Walker Cup play, it took even the veteran golf observers four or five holes to appreciate Littler's self-schooled technique. In those days Gene took the club back with a very, very slow, easy, relaxed rhythm, then paused a lazy second at the top before droning slowly down into the ball, delaying his accelerated hitting action until the very last moment when the club head was only two feet or so from the ball. There were quite a few of us, I remember, who, on first watching Gene, got the idea that he hadn't had time to hit out some practice balls and was still warming up. He was all warmed up, to be sure, and during the full course of his rounds never changed the unhurrying tempo of his shot-making or, for that matter, his benign attitude toward the whole pressureful business of competitive golf. He won both his singles and foursome matches at Kittansett, and when he went on to win the National Amateur a fortnight later everyone who had watched him was gratified (since the Amateur is a rough championship) but no one was really surprised.

 

Today, some 18 months later, behind him a successful first year as a pro in which he won over $13,000 in prize money and finished a stroke behind the winner in the National Open, Gene has changed very little either as a person or as a golfer. The speed of his swing has quickened perceptibly, due to the week-in, week-out demands of the circuit, but it is still (along with Snead's) one of the two slowest and soundest in golf. He is a little longer off the tees, say eight or 10 yards. He walks a little faster between shots, at what might be described as a brisk saunter. He still lines up his shots without fuss and then, as he phrases it, "I just take the club back and let it go."

 

"CONCENTRATION AND ATTITUDE"

 

One morning last week, before going out for his round in the Pro-Amateur, which preceded the start of the Tucson Open, Gene arrived at the El Rio Club after finishing his morning cup of tea in the trailer in which he lives on the road with his wife Shirley and their year-old son Curt; and, since he was asked, he talked about his golf and the circuit. "I didn't play really well in some of the tournaments I've won," he was explaining. "On the tour, playing golf continuously, you get a little bit tired physically after a while but that doesn't bother you. What really gets worn down is your concentration. You've got to keep alert all the time. That's one of the two big things I've learned on the tour, and the second one also has to do with your attitude. That's learning to minimize your mistakes, not to get sore at yourself. The experience all of us are trying to gain from the tour is how to assemble a fairly good round even when you're not hitting the ball particularly well that day. That takes concentration—and attitude."

 

One technical department of his game which, by Littler's own assessment, can stand considerable improvement is the pitch to the pin from 120 yards out. "On the short circuit courses, it is the birdie shot and you can't score without it."

 

When his round was over, Gene, as is his habit, headed back to his trailer, changed into his old clothes and lounged around with his son before dinner. It is Gene's opinion that living in a trailer is the next best thing to living at home—"Everybody's proportions are different," the mature young man was saying the other night, "but, for myself, I find I can play better if there are some other things in my life to think about besides golf, golf, golf."

[kenberg]

I see that Andre Previn died. I was thinking he msr be abcient but he was "only" 89, just shy of 90. He started very young.

 

See a sample at

 

The WaPo Obit had various anecdotes, one that struck home:

 

His memoir of his years working — and playing — in Hollywood, "No Minor Chords" (1991), recounted his youthful near-dalliance with screen siren Ava Gardner, who was "the kind of beautiful that turned men into Jell-O molds."

"She listened to me play, quite attentively," he wrote, "and then asked an incredible question: 'Would you like to take me home later?'

 

"Well, I was 17 and I simply could not allow myself to put a subtext connotation to this, so I asked: 'You mean you don't have a ride home?' Ava gave me a long, searching look, saw that I was serious, excused herself and got up from the piano bench."

 

I have long felt that an under-appreciated fact about adolescent males is that we often had only a very weak grasp of what's going on. That applied to me and yes, Becky might say that it still does. Not that Ava Gardiner ever suggested to me that I take her home, but I can definitely relate to the confusion in his mind.

 

[nullve]

Keith Flint

[y66]

Hal Blaine, the ubiquitous drummer whose work in the 1960s and ’70s with Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, the Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, the Ronettes and many others established him as one of the top session musicians of all time, died on Monday at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 90.

 

Mr. Blaine, who played on at least 40 singles that reached No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart, was a reliable and adaptable musician, able to offer delicate brushwork on a ballad or a booming beat on records produced by Phil Spector, who was known for his so-called Wall of Sound.

 

Mr. Blaine brought drama to a song’s transitions, often telegraphing a big moment with a flurry of strokes on a snare drum or tom-tom.

 

If he had a signature moment on a record, it was on the Ronettes’ 1963 hit, “

,” produced by Mr. Spector. The song opened cold, with Mr. Blaine playing — and repeating — the percussive earworm “Bum-ba-bum-BOOM!” But the riff came about accidentally.

 

“I was supposed to play more of a boom-chicky-boom beat, but my stick got stuck and it came out boom, boom-boom chick,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2011. “I just made sure to make the same mistake every few bars.”

 

Three years later, he used the same beat, but in a softer way, on Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night.”

 

Mr. Blaine was part of a loosely affiliated group of session musicians who in the early 1960s began dominating rock ’n’ roll recording in Los Angeles. Along with guitarists like Glen Campbell and Tony Tedesco, bassists like Carol Kaye and Joe Osborn, and keyboardists like Leon Russell and Don Randi, Mr. Blaine played on thousands of recordings through the mid-1970s.

 

He famously said he gave the group its name, the Wrecking Crew, although Ms. Kaye has insisted that he did not start using that term until years after the musicians had stopped working together.

 

His skills led producers to use Mr. Blaine as the drummer for various groups’ studio work, replacing their credited drummers. The drummer heard on the Beach Boys’ records was often Mr. Blaine and not the drummer the group’s fans knew, Dennis Wilson, whose brother Brian was the band’s creative force.

 

“I must tell you, first of all, Dennis was not really a drummer,” Mr. Blaine told Modern Drummer magazine in 2005. “I mean, they had bought him drums because they needed drums in the group. So he learned as they went on.”

 

Asked if Mr. Wilson was angry that he was replaced in the studio, Mr. Blaine said he was not.

 

“He was thrilled,” he said, “because while I was making Beach Boy records, he was out surfing or riding his motorcycle. During the day, when I was making $35 or $40, that night he was making $35,000” performing live.

 

Mr. Blaine’s other studio credits include Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” the 5th Dimension’s “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Ms. Streisand’s “The Way We Were,” the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron” and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s “A Taste of Honey.”

 

In 2000, Mr. Blaine was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with four other studio musicians, including the drummer Earl Palmer, who had helped introduce him to session work. The Recording Academy gave Mr. Blaine a lifetime achievement Grammy Award last year.

 

Hal Blaine was born Harold Simon Belsky on Feb. 5, 1929, in Holyoke, Mass., to Meyer Belsky, who worked in a leather factory, and Rose (Silverman) Belsky. When he was 7 the family moved to Hartford, where he was inspired to learn drumming by watching the fife and drum corps of the Roman Catholic school across the street from his Hebrew school.

 

“One of the priests noticed I was watching, and before long I was playing with these kids,” he told The Hartford Courant in 2000.

 

On Saturdays, he regularly went to a theater in Hartford to watch big bands, singers and vaudeville acts, and he grew to admire virtuoso drummers like Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa.

 

When he was 14, he moved with his family to Southern California. He attended high school in San Bernardino while his parents opened a delicatessen in Santa Monica.

 

After serving as an Army cartographer during the Korean War, Mr. Blaine attended a drum school in Chicago run by Roy C. Knapp, who had been Mr. Krupa’s teacher. He began to play drums in strip clubs, and by the late 1950s he was working with a jazz quartet. He then worked with the teenage idol Tommy Sands and the pop singer Patti Page. He also played briefly with Count Basie’s big band at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, filling in when Mr. Basie’s regular drummer, Sonny Payne, was sick.

 

Until the early 1960s, Mr. Blaine thought of himself as a jazz drummer. But his work in the Los Angeles studios identified him, almost exclusively, as pop music’s go-to session drummer.

 

Once he established himself in the studios, Mr. Blaine rarely performed live. One exception came in the 1960s, when Nancy Sinatra persuaded him to work with her at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas; she put his name on the marquee and arranged for a nanny for his daughter, Michelle. And in the mid-1970s, John Denver brought him on tour.

 

“His favorite time was with John,” Mr. Johnson, Mr. Blaine’s son-in-law, said in a telephone interview. “They were like brothers, and he was really torn up when John passed.” Mr. Denver died in 1997 when the single-engine airplane he was piloting crashed into Monterey Bay in California.

 

Mr. Blaine was far less busy in studios in the 1980s. By then producers were increasingly relying on drum machines, and more self-contained bands insisted on playing their own instruments. He started giving drum clinics and worked on commercial jingles. He played most recently at a party for his 90th birthday at a Los Angeles nightclub.

 

Jim Keltner, a drummer who also became known for his session work, recalled the first time he saw Mr. Blaine play, in the 1960s.

 

“I can hardly describe the effect it had on me,” Mr. Keltner wrote in the foreword to “Hal Blaine & the Wrecking Crew” (1990), an autobiography written with David Goggin. “He was playing a beat I’d heard thousands of times but was giving it a certain kind of sophisticated funk that I’d never heard before.”

 

“How was he able to do these things with his drums?”

By Richard Sandomir at NYT.

[Cyberyeti]

Keith Flint

 

I went to see Stiff Little Fingers last night. They played this as a tribute (with an expletive laden message to "talk to somebody" if you're in that situation):

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g2T_IZoN1I

[y66]

W.S. Merwin, Poet

 

Black Cherries by W.S. Merwin

 

Late in May as the light lengthens

toward summer the young goldfinches

flutter down through the day for the first time

to find themselves among fallen petals

cradling their day’s colors in the day’s shadows

of the garden beside the old house

after a cold spring with no rain

not a sound comes from the empty village

as I stand eating the black cherries

from the loaded branches above me

saying to myself Remember this

[Winstonm]

New Zealand's 49 Muslim victims of hatred.

[y66]

Alan Kreuger, Economist

 

From Barack Obama:

 

Over the weekend, America lost a brilliant economist, and many of us lost a dear friend.

 

When I asked Alan Krueger to serve as my chief economist in the White House, he’d already had a stellar career inside and outside of government. He spent the first two years of my administration helping to engineer our response to the worst financial crisis in 80 years, and to successfully prevent the chaos from spiraling into a second Great Depression. During his tenure as the Chair of my Council of Economic Advisors, he helped us return the economy to growth and sustained job creation, to bring down the deficit in a responsible way, and to set the stage for wages to rise again.

 

But Alan was someone who was deeper than numbers on a screen and charts on a page. He saw economic policy not as a matter of abstract theories, but as a way to make people’s lives better. He believed that facts, reason, and evidence could make government more responsive, and his enthusiasm and curiosity was truly infectious. It’s part of what made him not only a great economist but a great teacher – someone who could make complicated subjects accessible and even fun. A landmark, real-world study on the positive impact of the minimum wage. His creation of the “Gatsby Curve” that illustrated the connection between concentrated wealth and social mobility between generations. A rollicking speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on how understanding the economics of rock and roll might help us solve one of his deepest concerns: rebuilding the middle class in a changing economy. Through it all, he had a perpetual smile and a gentle spirit – even when he was correcting you. That’s what made him Alan – a fundamentally good and decent man.

[StevenG]

Scott Walker.

 

Tilt is amongst my favourite albums ever.

[Cyberyeti]

Roger Charlery AKA Ranking Roger, co-frontman of The Beat (The English Beat in the US). A voice of my teenage years, along with bands like the Specials and the Selecter on the 2 tone label, they brought a big ska revival 1978-85 ish.

 

[hrothgar]

Roger Charlery AKA Ranking Roger, co-frontman of The Beat (The English Beat in the US). A voice of my teenage years, along with bands like the Specials and the Selecter on the 2 tone label, they brought a big ska revival 1978-85 ish.

 

 

*****...

 

I saw them live a couple times. First time was in London in 83 or so...

 

Great band

[Winstonm]

Alphonse "Little Al" D'Arco

 

First member of his generation of Italian cosa nostra to flip and go into witness protection.

[y66]

Agnès Varda, beloved French New Wave director

[PassedOut]

Kitty Tucker

 

My classmate in both high school and university, and a wonderful friend, Kitty made her mark in the world. This has been a sad week for me.

[y66]

Richard Lugar

 

Mr. Lugar, who had two stints as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had an impact on a wide range of foreign issues, but his most notable accomplishment was indisputably as the co-creator of a program to help destroy surplus stocks of nuclear weapons around the world.

 

The project was emblematic of his approach to legislating: It represented an ability to take a long view about complex issues, ran counter to the inclinations of many of his fellow Republicans and was built on a foundation of bipartisan cooperation. It was presented jointly with Senator Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat who was chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

 

The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program was based on the novel concept of providing American funds to destroy obsolete nuclear missiles and materials elsewhere in the world. At the time, the countries of the former Soviet Union said they could not afford the costs of the destruction and were not even providing sufficient resources to properly guard the weapons’ storage areas.

 

The idea was first proposed during the term of President George H. W. Bush, who opposed it, along with many others. It took almost a decade, but Mr. Lugar succeeded in persuading Congress, and especially skeptical fellow Republicans, of the need for such a program.

 

He was also Congress’s leading voice on treaties to ban or limit nuclear weapons, and his judgment on any such proposals was often crucial to whether one could be enacted.

[barmar]

I'm surprised Trump hasn't tried to repeal it -- it sounds like the kind of program he really hates, since it's not "America First".

 

Maybe he just didn't know about it, but now Lugar's death might raise his awareness of it.

[kenberg]

I have to note the passing of Doris Day

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/doris-day-singer-and-perpetually-chaste-movie-star-of-the-1950s-and-60s-dies-at-97/2019/05/13/c86cb9ae-757f-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html?utm_term=.3b9e12386556

The article notes that Sentimental Journey was recorded in 1945. It's a song I remember from early childhood along with Sioux City Sue (Gene Autry, 1945) and Cow Cow Boogie (Ella Mae Morse, 1942!) . Becky and I disagree over Ms. Day, Becky really can't stand five minutes of her on film, I think you have to sit back, take it for what it is and enjoy it. The article also repeats the much quoted quip of uncertain origin "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin". Pillow Talk was a very dumb movie. I enjoyed it. There, I have confessed.

 

[barmar]

I'm not as old as Ken, I mainly remember her from her TV Show in the late 60's, which used her hit "Que Sera, Sera" as the theme song.

 

This is one of those "I had no idea she was still alive" death reports.

[barmar]

Tim Conway

 

Arguably the funniest member of the ensemble on The Carol Burnett Show, which is saying quite a bit.

[Lovera]

Niki Lauda:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niki_Lauda

[y66]

Murray Gell-Mann

 

There is nothing physicists love more than a mess of puzzling, apparently contradictory experimental results. Physicists are convinced that nature is fundamentally simple, and that they can discover hidden principles which bring order to the chaos — if they just think about it hard enough. Nobody was better at finding order amid apparent chaos than Murray Gell-Mann, who died on Friday.

 

The 1950s and 60s were a Golden Age of particle physics, as accelerators produced a plethora of new particles with unpredictable properties. This presented a problem: There were too many of these new particles, which appeared in collisions without any evident rhyme or reason. They didn’t look anything like the kind of simple, elegant structure scientists expect from the laws of nature.

 

With a series of brilliant strokes, Dr. Gell-Mann revealed the secret pattern that made everything snap into place. His Eightfold Way, mischievously named after a Buddhist doctrine of liberation, made sense of the new particles that had been discovered and predicted ones that hadn’t been. The Eightfold Way is to elementary particles what the Periodic Table is to chemical elements. Ultimately, he proposed “quarks,” unobserved particles that are bound together in groups of two or three, to account for almost all of the new discoveries.

 

But that wasn’t all.

 

Dr. Gell-Mann was at the center of a whirlwind of theoretical activity. He showed how quantum mechanics allowed a particle to transform into a different particle and then back again. He demonstrated that the strength of particle interactions would depend on the energy with which they were colliding. With his colleague Richard Feynman, he explicated the symmetry structure of the weak nuclear force, one of the four forces of nature. He proposed a physical quantity — “strangeness” — that would explain why some particles lasted longer than others. He, along with Harald Fritzsch, hypothesized that there were force-carrying particles, which they called “gluons,” that hold quarks together. Each of these ideas has subsequently been triumphantly confirmed by experiment.

 

Any one of these achievements would have served as the high point in the career of any physicist. And there were many others he could have received credit for, as he often waited too long to publish and was occasionally scooped; the Eightfold Way was proposed independently by Yuval Ne’eman, and quarks were theorized by George Zweig. Dr. Gell-Mann’s perfectionism could get the best of him.

 

Where Dr. Gell-Mann almost always came out ahead was in giving names to his ideas. Dr. Ne’eman simply referred to his proposal by its mathematical label, “SU(3).” That was never going to compete with the romance of “the Eightfold Way,” even if Dr. Gell-Mann did later regret providing an opening to those who would connect quantum physics with Eastern mysticism. Dr. Zweig, on the other hand, called his hypothetical particles “aces,” which lacked the enigmatic heft of “quarks.” Dr. Gell-Mann actually had the sound “kwork” first, and then later noticed the sentence “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” in James Joyce’s novel “Finnegans Wake.” There was no connection to particle physics, but Dr. Gell-Mann didn’t let that get in the way of a colorful coinage.

 

Today, the situation in particle physics is the opposite of that in the postwar boom. All of the data being produced in high-energy accelerators is beautifully explained by a single theory with a highly unromantic name: the Standard Model. It was put together over years by numerous talented scientists, but nobody had a greater part in its construction than Dr. Gell-Mann.

 

There are many ways to become an influential theoretical physicist. Some produce creative new ideas, while others are masters of intricate calculations. Some are best at speculating about the unknown, while others bring clarity and insight to established lore. Part of what made Dr. Gell-Mann special was his mastery of all these modes. His work with Francis Low on the “renormalization group” taught physicists how phenomena at high energies and short distances could be elegantly related to what happens at low energies and long distances. This philosophy remains the central organizing principle of much of modern physics.

 

Once the Standard Model triumphed in the 1970s and 80s, Dr. Gell-Mann didn’t rest on his laurels. He became convinced of a pressing need for more interdisciplinary work on complex systems. He consequently helped found the Santa Fe Institute, which is today the world’s leading research center on complexity, and which was Dr. Gell-Mann’s research home for the last decades of his life.

 

It was an interesting move for someone who had garnered so much fame working as a particle physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Elementary particles are the most fundamental building blocks of nature, and their study would seem to be an expression of simplification in its purest form. The essence of complexity research, by contrast, is the emergence of new kinds of order that are only manifest when systems are large and messy.

 

But this shift of perspective suited Dr. Gell-Mann, who was never comfortable with narrow disciplinary boundaries. He was a rare breed of wide-ranging polymath, well-versed in archaeology, history and ornithology. With his former student James Hartle, he proposed a way of understanding the foundations of quantum mechanics, a puzzle that has bothered physicists since the days of Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. His final research program was an expansive project to study the evolution of human languages.

[Winstonm]

Leon Redbone Born ??? - Died May 30, 2019

 

[PassedOut]

Mac Rebennack

 

Such a night

[Winstonm]

Mac Rebennack

 

Such a night

 

Guess he finally got to the right place at the right time.

[y66]

Molly O'Neill

 

I tried to tease the extraordinary from the mundane, and to use the familiar — the sprig of basil, the bottle of olive oil — to usher readers into social, geographic and cultural worlds where they otherwise might not go.

In "Letter From Cambodia" (New Yorker, July 23, 2001), she describes a trip that she and Sottha Khunn, then head chef at Le Cirque, took to Siem Reap in Cambodia where he grew up to "give his mother some happiness before she dies, help her finish the house, maybe cook for her and her friends one perfect meal. Better than sending orchids to the funeral."

 

"They're not going to like the bass-too spicy, too bold. I got carried away."

 

The dish didn't look bold; it looked innocent. Sottha hadn't added the tomatoes. The butter sauce was light, and its lemony hue, combined with the pale minced chives and wild greens, was almost translucent against the white fish fillets, like refracted sunlight. Without the tomatoes, the sauce was tart and sour, the fish gentle and sweet. The scent of lemongrass erupted like a cheer over the distant, poignant memory of galan­gal and garlic. Sottha had done it: he had found a new balance between East and West.

 

The room became very quiet. The el­ders looked at each other as if one of their children had just won the Nobel Prize. Within three minutes, every plate on the table looked as if it had been licked clean. When Sottha saw the empty plates, he understood that he'd seriously misread the crowd. Cocsal lifted his Scotch glass and said,"Bravo!"

 

The three Mesdames raised champagne glasses in a babble of "Gincin!" "Cheers!" "Salut!" Sottha later told me, "It was at this precise moment that I realize exactly how stupid I am, a slave, all my life, to perfection, and for what? To be always alone? The perfect thing comes like a fortune or a war. You prepare but you never know exactly the day, and only a stupid man stands and waits."

 

The rest of the meal- by Sottha's standards, anyway- was anticlimactic ("Like the history of Cambodia since the ninth century," Cocsal cheerfully whispered to me). Nobody cared. Sottha brought it to the table, sat down, and ate with us. His fantasy of a formal evening became a family dinner. "What the hell," he said. "Everybody having a good time." Later, when I asked Sottha what had inspired him to leave the tomatoes out of the fish dish, he replied that it had simply been an over­sight. But his mother did not agree. "Sottha did not forget the tomatoes," she said as we cleared the table. "He remembered that he did not need them."