I was not going to do this today. This writing thing. But here I am, back at the library, spewing text for all the world to see while inhabiting a world in which I do not actually exist. Now I am listening to Sorabji, the real Sorabji, played by Frederic Ullén. He got something of a bad rap years ago when he appeared to have stolen an idea from my friend, Don Garvelmann. Ullén released an album called “Got a Minute?” which featured arrangements and treatments by a dozen or so composers of Chopin’s “Minute Waltz”. Sorabji’s arrangement (if you could call it that, it’s more of a pastiche) was included.
The problem with this was that Don had published a collection years earlier of 13 arrangements and transcription of the Chopin “Minute Waltz”, but Ullén made no reference to this and when confronted about it claimed to have never heard of it. I don’t know how that all panned out in the end but Ullén has gone on to represent Sorabji’s music pretty well, so I would think bygones could remain bygones. It was a petty squabble that Garvelmann himself never attempted to address with the pianist, as far as I know. I think it was one of Don’s friends who gently suggested Ullén could make some reference to Don’s publication, but I don’t know if he ever did.
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Today’s page 181 comes from The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2015. It is a page on which is listed “NOTED PERSONALITIES” and “WIDELY KNOWN AMERICANS OF THE PRESENT”. I am not listed but the names, listed alphabetically by last name, only get as far as Howard Dean. I am certain that I would be listed on page 182 or 183, wherever the T names begin. Names on 181 include Marc Andreessen, who lived in Iowa. I actually thought he was Norwegian. His toenails were ridiculed by my boss at Time Inc. when he (Andreessen) appeared on the cover of Time magazine. He was said to have been a victim of the Time Inc. curse, where your career falters once you make the cover of any of the company’s magazines. I think that was a pretty baseless superstition, but it could be said to have come true for Netscape, which Andreessen developed. That product was crushed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, not so much because IE was a better product but because it was free. Netscape I seem to remember cost something ridiculous, like $50.
But Microsoft had what I think was a more traditional approach to thing. A web browser is (or was in those days) essentially nothing more than a file viewer, and file viewers had traditionally always been free. MS Word and Excel document viewers were always free. The software used to create Word documents and Excel spreadsheets cost money, but the ability for people who did not have that software to simply view documents had always been made available for free. Well maybe not always but it was far from unknown. So charging anything for Netscape seemed like a doomed idea from the start, not that it had any other means of supporting itself.
Also on page 181 is Tom Brokaw, the NBC newsman of yore. He happens to have written a piece for today’s New York Times that was something between a memoir and an editorial. I never thought about Brokaw’s politics but I would have taken him to be more to the right. In fact he sounds crazed liberal, to use his own words. He was offered the position of press secretary to Richard Nixon, which sounds like he not only dodged a bullet but a nuclear missile. The story ends with him and Nixon agreeing on one thing and one thing only: Brokaw made a damn good decision in refusing that job. That is amusing.
Brokaw seems to think pretty highly of himself. He’s from that last generation where news anchors were held in some kind of reverence, at least among themselves. Years ago I remember Brokaw wrote an editorial for some publication, I can’t recall which, where he lamented his failures in life, or rather his lack of successes and achievement. Here was a guy with more claims to immortality than about 99% of the population complaining that he never learned French, or visited Antarctica. He got some blowback for it in the letters section.
He had already retired as a newsman when 9/11 happened but I remember how aggressively and, I thought, tactlessly he tried to insert himself into the coverage of the days that followed. He had no official reason to be there save for his perceived status as some kind of poobah, a wise man from the Cronkite generation. He was no Cronkite, but then neither was Cronkite. Cronkite suggested, years too late, that his closing refrain “That’s the way it is” was perhaps a bit pompous. Gee, you think? Minus commercials you just delivered 20-something minutes of summary information about selected matters from all over creation, and you want me to believe that you’ve described “the way it is” for all things?
OK, I don’t really want to be here too long today. It is beautiful out. A woman sitting across from me has a most interesting tattoo.
Other names on page 181 include Mark Cuban, Andrew Cuomo, Mario Cuomo (who died since this book was published), and Ann Curry. The alphabetical roll calls of life bring together the oddest combinations of people.
