Death.

Mostly, when walking down the street, I tend unthinkingly to say, “There’s a young woman…there’s a child…there’s an old lady…there’s a teen…there’s a fortysomething guy,” etc. But lately—and I don’t know why this is—I’m sometimes seeing differently. Now I’m realizing that every single person I see on the street is aging before my eyes. It happens slowly, so that we can’t see it happening, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. The four-year old toddler is 30 seconds closer to death than he was when I first saw him. That twentysomething girl is 10 seconds closer to being an old lady than when she started crossing the street. Every part of that traffic cop’s body is decaying right now. We’d need some kind of time-lapse photography for our eyes to know it, but it’s going on regardless. Every single person, no matter what age, is marching inexorably toward death every single second of the day. So there really is no difference between the three-year old tyke, the seventh grader, the recently retired business dude, and the ninety-year old crone. We are all in this together.

I am older than when I started writing this blog post. You are older than when you started reading it.

Let’s make the most of whatever time we’ve got left.

Gamesmanship.

A friend (Jim Dyer) told me he heard the true reason Hillary is staying in the race at least through West Virginia today and Kentucky next week. She is staying in because the Obama campaign has asked her to!

Here’s the Obama camp’s reasoning. Let’s say Hillary had graciously bowed out after the North Carolina and Indiana results last week. Although she’d be out of the race, the primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky would still take place, and her name would still be on the ballots there. And—very likely—because of the makeup of the electorate in those states—she would still win both those races with landslide margins over Obama! Now, how would it look for Obama to lose big in those states when his opponent isn’t even in the contest anymore? It would look very bad, indeed. Better, less humiliating, to have those Clinton victories occur when she’s ostensibly still running.

You’ve got to hand it to Team Obama. If it can run the White House as smartly as it’s running the campaign, the country will be in good shape.

Cover Versions.

Speaking of Sinatra-Basie (and I just was), here are shots of the original LP front and back cover.

These are from John Brown’s website Sinatra Album Covers, a treasure trove of high-res, larger-than-life (meaning, larger than CD—you know, like records used to be) scans. Fun to browse through.

It’s Sinatra’s World Wide Web. We’re Just Blogging In It.

The new 42¢ Frank Sinatra postage stamp comes out next Tuesday, May 13. The following day is the tenth anniversary of his death.

I’m undecided. Should I buy 1000 of these stamps? Or 10,000?

While deciding, I think I’ll listen to Frank’s recording of “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter,” with the Count Basie Band, from the 1962 desert-island disc Sinatra-Basie.

Here’s a li’l taste of it right here. If you can listen to that and not want to buy the record, you ain’t breathin’, Jack.

More Proof That Obama Reads My Blog.

On May 2, I wrote:

…We need candidates humble enough that they can admit, rather than deny, that they are deeply flawed, and who then can make the case that they deserve to lead anyway. I can imagine that.

Tonight in North Carolina, in his victory speech (phew!), Obama said:

We will end it this time not because I’m perfect — I think by now this campaign has reminded all of us of that…We will end it by telling the truth - forcefully, repeatedly, confidently — and by trusting that the American people will embrace the need for change.

Want still more proof Obama is listening to me (as if any were needed)? As he stood and delivered his speech, nary a trace of torticollis!

Check, Please.

One form of autograph collecting is the acquisition of cancelled checks, which somehow make their way into the hands of collectables-dealers. For those who, like me, are interested in collectables to do with the Great American Songbook, here are two bank checks written by titans of the art. They were purchased on eBay by my wife as a gift for me.

The first was written by lyricist Sammy Cahn on the joint account he shared with his wife Tita, on July 1, 1972. It is written to Cafe “72″ in the amount of $30.00 and contains, on the memo line, the words “Book Pub.” Perhaps this dinner was connected to the enjoyable autobiography he was to publish in 1974, I Should Care: The Sammy Cahn Story . A stamp on the back of the check indicates that Cafe “72″was a New York establishment, but a quick Googling doesn’t produce any businesses by that name still in existence there. I like the size of Cahn’s signature on the check. Cahn (at least in his public persona) was not known for excessive modesty–nor should he have suffered from this, given his resumé. (Four Oscar wins, thirty nominations, Frank Sinatra’s “house lyricist” in the fifties and sixties, etc.) The signature is congruent with the persona.

The second is a check written by singer Mel Torme on the Mel Torme Productions, Inc. account, for $64.15, to the Curious Book Shop in Los Gatos, CA on September 5, 1989. Torme was known to be an avid reader. As recently as 1998, the Curious Book Shop was listed as one of the three best places for used books in the Santa Clara Valley, but it exists no longer.

Daryl Sherman.

If you are in the New York area, get yourself to the Waldorf-Astoria tonight or tomorrow night, because those are your last two nights to catch Daryl Sherman in the cocktail lounge that overlooks the lobby before her 14-year reign ends there.

Daryl sings, and accompanies herself on the Steinway that once belonged to Cole Porter, who was a resident of the hotel.

Stephen Holden has a wonderful appreciation of Daryl in today’s New York Times. Rather than go on and on myself about her, I’ll refer you to that piece.

I’ll only add that I was lucky to catch Daryl at the Waldorf again two Sundays ago. Actually, lucky isn’t the word—blessed would be more like it, but that sounds too much like going overboard (even though it isn’t).

Just one highlight that evening was Daryl’s performance of a song with music by Bill Evans, words added by Roger Schore, called “In April.” Heartbreakingly gorgeous. It was Evans’ tune “For Nanette,” retitled when Schore supplied the lyric. I had never heard it before. I don’t think Daryl has recorded it.

Another highlight was Daryl’s acceding to my request to do Vernon Duke-Ira Gershwin’s “Island in the West Indies,” a number I first heard her perform at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington during the Great Songbirds Convergence of 2001. This is a combination of song and performer that is as good as music gets, and if you think that is overstatement, well, then, you haven’t heard her do it.

In the event you don’t catch Daryl’s act at the Waldorf these last two nights, you owe it to yourself to check her out on CD. There are several available from Amazon, as well as eMusic and iTunes.

The Rove-ian Fallacy.

We Democrats like to imagine that Karl Rove was an evil genius, capable of masterfully marginalizing opponents with a unique brand of Republicentric spin that America was helpless not to believe. And in the current race, we sometimes say that whichever Democrat we’re not for is using Rove-ian tactics against whichever Democrat we are for. It’s a way to cast negative interpretations as unfair, out of bounds, invalid.

But here’s the thing. To be believed, spin has to be believable. It has to resonate with the common sense of people. To gain traction, it has to reinforce something people already intuit. Not even Karl Rove could just make any damn thing up and have it stick—evil mastermind that he was.

When Rove-ian spinmeisters “swift-boated” John Kerry in 2004, Democrats thought it an outrage that a war hero’s courage could be questioned by supporters of an opponent who avoided the war. What Democrats didn’t take into account was that there was something fishy about John Kerry. Sadly, it wasn’t that hard to doubt his war heroism. People sensed (correctly!) something phony, arrogant and self-serving about the man. The swift-boating played right into that perception—but it did not invent it. It could not have worked had there not been something fundamentally untrustworthy about Kerry. The charges of the swift-boaters may not be have been factual, but they were, in some more important sense, true.

In the ongoing Democratic primary, each side is in furious denial that the flaws being assessed to its own candidate are real. But if they were not, no spin could make them seem so.

If Hillary Clinton’s honesty were not already a question mark, no amount of negative spin about her Bosnia landing strip fabrications could make her vulnerable.

If there were not legitimate reasons for concern about Barack Obama’s judgment, then his judgment in befriending Jeremiah Wright all these last 20 years would not be subject to attack.

The way for us Democrats to fight spin is not to argue that spin is unfair or without basis. It rarely is. (Outrageous lies abound, of course, but these tend not to gain traction.) It’s to put up candidates who, for once, don’t hand opponents all the spin-ammo they need in a silver pouch. We’ve got to make attacking us at least a little more challenging than shooting fish in a barrel.

Or else, we need candidates humble enough that they can admit, rather than deny, that they are deeply flawed, and who then can make the case that they deserve to lead anyway. I can imagine that.

Tony Miceli Gets Up.

Tony Miceli takes his first steps after knee replacement surgery.

Torticollis.

I think Barack Obama has torticollis.

First, let me say that I’m greatly heartened by his unequivocal rejection of Jeremiah Wright today. (The above screen shot is from his press conference that greatly heartens me.) The disgust he expresses, which goes much farther than his “race” speech in Philadelphia, is everything one could wish for.

But second, let me say that the head tilt that is evident in the screen shot has me a little worried. Not on America’s behalf, but on Barack’s. I first began to notice it about a month ago, in the last debate, the one held in Philadelphia. (The one in which he endured 45 minutes of questioning about his personal associations.) That night, he showed a consistent tendency to tilt his head camera-left (to his own right), and it is apparent that he is still doing this. The tilt is actually more pronounced than the sreen shot shows.

At the time, I remarked on this to my personal trainer (I am working on my own posture, which leaves something to be desired), and she replied that it could be torticollis. Torticollis can either be congenital (part of your m.o. from birth), or it can be acquired in adulthood. If congenital, the cause

is unclear. Birth trauma or intrauterine malposition is considered to cause damage to the sternocleidomastoid muscle in the neck. This results in a shortening or excessive contraction of the sternocleidomastoid muscle, often with limited range of motion in both rotation and lateral bending. The head is typically tilted in lateral bending toward the affected muscle and rotated toward the opposite side.

If torticollis is acquired in adulthood, the cause can be anything from consistently sleeping in a bad bed, to (God forbid) a tumor at the skull base, to (God forbid again) the taking of antipsychotic drugs. I don’t know what is causing Obama’s torticollis (and the screen shot doesn’t do justice to the degree of head tilt I’ve seen him demonstrate in the last month), but my lay diagnosis is that he has it. I hope he finds the cause, and then finds the cure. I want my President to have his head screwed on straight.