Whipped Cream Difficulties

Lawrence sent over a pointer to the NYT obit for Stanley Crouch.

Mr. Crouch defied easy categorization. A former Black nationalist who had been seared by witnessing the 1965 Watts race riots in his native Los Angeles, he transformed himself into a widely read essayist, syndicated newspaper columnist, novelist and MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winner whose celebrity was built, in part, on his skewering — and even physical smackdowns — of his former intellectual comrades.
All the while he championed jazz, enlarging its presence in American culture by helping to found Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, one of the country’s premier showcases for that most American of musical genres, and by promoting the career of the celebrated trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who co-founded the jazz center in 1991 and remains its artistic director.

…

Espousing that pragmatism, he found ready adversaries among fellow Black Americans, whom he criticized as defining themselves in racial terms and as reducing the broader Black experience to one of victimization. He vilified gangsta rap as “‘Birth of a Nation’ with a backbeat,” the Rev. Al Sharpton as a “buffoon,” the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “insane,” the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison “as American as P.T. Barnum” and Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” as “opportunistic.”
By contrast, he venerated his intellectual mentors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who, by his lights, saw beyond the conventions of race and ideology while viewing the contributions of Black people as integral to the American experience.

…

After transplanting himself to New York in 1975, Mr. Crouch wrote for The Village Voice, where he was hired as a staff writer in 1980 and fired in 1988 after a fistfight with a fellow writer.
“The two best things that have ever happened to me were being fired by The Voice and being hired by The Voice, in that order,” he told The New Yorker.

…

Mr. Crouch said in an interview with The Times in 1990 that too many discussions of race were “simple-minded and overly influenced by the ideas of determinism — if you’re poor, you’re going to act a certain way” — a self-perpetuating path that, he said, his public-school teachers had stopped him from taking.
“These people were on a mission,” he said of his teachers. “They had a perfect philosophy: You will learn this. If you came in there and said, ‘I’m from a dysfunctional family and a single-parent household,’ they would say, ‘Boy, I’m going to ask you again, What is 8 times 8?’
“When I was coming up,” he continued, “there were no excuses except your house burned down and there was a murder in the family. Eight times eight was going to be 64 whether your family was dysfunctional or not. It’s something you needed to know!”

Great and good FotB Borepatch was kind enough to send over an obit for Don Williams. But I’m seeing other reports that Mr. Williams actually passed away almost three years ago, and I’m having trouble sorting out what’s what. I’m going to argue, though, that good music is timeless.

Speaking of good music: Julian Bream.

And not speaking of music at all: Charles Wetli. He was a forensic pathologist and medical examiner, first in Dade County, Florida, then as the chief medical examiner of Suffolk County, Long Island.

He’d been at that job for 18 months when TWA 800 happened. He took a lot of flack for some of his decisions:

When the bodies were not immediately recovered and identified, family members directed their fury at Dr. Wetli. They worried that swift action regarding their loved ones had become secondary to the retrieval of forensic evidence for a criminal investigation.
Beyond that, families and politicians accused him of making blunders that only compounded their grief — he did not immediately work around the clock, he initially refused the help of pathologists from other jurisdictions and he did not allow most family members to see what remained of their loved ones.

But the obit points out that a lot of those decisions were defensible: there was no point in doing autopsies around the clock if they didn’t have fingerprints or dental records, which it took time to get from the families. And he didn’t ask for help initially because he wanted to make sure he had a good process in place with his own people before bringing in others.

“There’s no point having everybody show up and wait around doing nothing or giving advice I don’t need,” he told The New York Times in 1996. “I don’t need 30 dentists at 8 o’clock in the morning.”

And as for letting family see the remains…

The explosion and a plunge of 13,800 feet into a wall of water had sheared the skin, clothes and limbs from many passengers, making them more difficult to identify — and more disfigured — than most bodies that end up in a morgue. He did not want families to see the gruesome remains.

In spite of all this:

Christine Negroni, a CNN journalist who covered the crash and was the author of “The Deadly Departure of Flight 800” (2000), wrote in a recent tribute: “Dr. Wetli should be remembered as a pioneering forensic physician who assembled an array of dentists, X-ray technicians, pathologists and tiny samples of DNA to put a name on every bit of human remains recovered.”

Bad day for music.

Ennio Morricone. Variety.

Imitated, scorned, spoofed, what came to be known as “The Dollars Trilogy” — “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1965) and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), all released in the United States in 1967 — starred Clint Eastwood as “The Man With No Name” and were enormous hits, with a combined budget of $2 million and gross worldwide receipts of $280 million.
The trilogy’s Italian dialogue was dubbed for the English-speaking market, and the action was brooding and slow, with clichéd close-ups of gunfighters’ eyes. But Mr. Morricone, breaking the unwritten rule never to upstage actors with music, infused it all with wry sonic weirdness and melodramatic strains that many fans embraced with cultlike devotion and that critics called viscerally true to Mr. Leone’s vision of the Old West
“In the films that established his reputation in the 1960s, the series of spaghetti westerns he scored for Mr. Leone, Mr. Morricone’s music is anything but a backdrop,” The New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote in 2007. “It’s sometimes a conspirator, sometimes a lampoon, with tunes that are as vividly in the foreground as any of the actors’ faces.”
Mr. Morricone also scored Mr. Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) and his Jewish gangster drama, “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), both widely considered masterpieces. But he became most closely identified with “The Dollars Trilogy,” and in time grew weary of answering for their lowbrow sensibilities.
Asked by The Guardian in 2006 why “A Fistful of Dollars” had made such an impact, he said: “I don’t know. It’s the worst film Leone made and the worst score I did.”

“Lowbrow sensibilities”, my Aunt Fannie.

Mr. Morricone looked professorial in bow ties and spectacles, with wisps of flyaway white hair. He sometimes holed up in his palazzo in Rome and wrote music for weeks on end, composing not at a piano but at a desk. He heard the music in his mind, he said, and wrote it in pencil on score paper for all orchestra parts.

…

Mr. Morricone never learned to speak English, never left Rome to compose, and for years refused to fly anywhere, though he eventually flew all over the world to conduct orchestras, sometimes performing his own compositions. While he wrote extensively for Hollywood, he did not visit the United States until 2007, when, at 78, he made a monthlong tour, punctuated by festivals of his films.

…

Talking to Mr. Pareles, Mr. Morricone placed his acclaimed oeuvre in a modest perspective. “The notion that I am a composer who writes a lot of things is true on one hand and not true on the other hand,” he said. “Maybe my time is better organized than many other people’s. But compared to classical composers like Bach, Frescobaldi, Palestrina or Mozart, I would define myself as unemployed.”

Edited to add: Just got this: a nice tribute to another aspect of Mr. Morricone’s work that I was unaware of.

Morricone, a man of staunch yet humble faith, was part of a gathering of 60 artists who paid musical tribute to Pope Benedict XVI’s 60th anniversary of his ordination.
The Vatican’s obituary goes on to tell how Morricone was so inspired by Pope Francis’s elevation that he wrote a Mass to celebrate both the new pope and all Jesuits. Titled Missa Papae Francisci, the work was also dedicated to his wife, Maria Travia, who had been encouraging Morricone to write such a sacred work for years. The Mass was premiered on the 200th anniversary of the re-establishment of the Jesuit order.
Morricone went on to work with Pope Francis to organize a concert “with the poor and for the poor” in 2016. The charity concert was performed by the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra, the National Academy of St. Cecilia, and Fr. Marco Frisina, raising much needed capital for several charitable projects of the Pontiff. Pope Francis later awarded Ennio the Pontifical Gold Medal, presented by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, on April 15, 2019.

This article also quotes the eloquent and touching statement Mr. Morricone requested be read on his passing.

Charlie Daniels. I loved “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” when I was a kid. Still have a soft spot for that song, even though some people might say I have “lowbrow sensibilities”.

There are many candidates for the libertarian national anthem. I’d argue this is one of the better ones:

A drunkard wants another drink of wine, and a politician wants your vote
I don’t want much of nothing at all, but I will take another toke
‘Cause I ain’t asking nobody for nothin’
If I can’t get it on my own
If you don’t like the way I’m livin’
You just leave this long haired country boy alone

And because it is there: