Eric Dolphy postcard.

[JSngry]

I've more or less abandoned cursive, except for signatures, for the last...30 or so years. I failed to see the purpose, and still don't see it. Leave it to the calligraphers (who are wonderful!!

My dad, who had beautiful old-school longhand (he was born in 1918) didn't like it, but I told him, hey, you complain about how you can barely read my writing, you can read this, right?  He laughed and said, ok, ok. But I still think he didn't like it. Then again, was would manually balance his checkbook down to the penny. Weekly. Pity the bank if the statement came and their balances didn't match his!

That's that old-school skill set. I've abandoned a lot of it, but still....there was a reason for it, and we lose something when we let it go, another level of analog consciousness. Here's hoping it's gonna be ok.

[ghost of miles]

1 hour ago, clifford_thornton said:

Yes, Bill Dixon lived in that building at that time also.

I also just remembered that "121 Bank Street" is the title of a David Baker composition on the Russell album At The Five Spot.

[catesta]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

I've more or less abandoned cursive, except for signatures, for the last...30 or so years. I failed to see the purpose, and still don't see it. Leave it to the calligraphers (who are wonderful!!

My dad, who had beautiful old-school longhand (he was born in 1918) didn't like it, but I told him, hey, you complain about how you can barely read my writing, you can read this, right?  He laughed and said, ok, ok. But I still think he didn't like it. Then again, was would manually balance his checkbook down to the penny. Weekly. Pity the bank if the statement came and their balances didn't match his!

That's that old-school skill set. I've abandoned a lot of it, but still....there was a reason for it, and we lose something when we let it go, another level of analog consciousness. Here's hoping it's gonna be ok.

Shit, I thought we were talking about printing, and mine still sucks. Cursive? Like you it's been maybe 25-30 years since I've done it. A couple of months ago I started practicing to more or less re-teach myself, but I never followed through.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

i mean, ive seen "freddy hubbard" a lot- i suppose unless you had his records in your home, remember this is before the internet, i suppose it would be no big thing to get a spelling wrong- i mean listen to how dolphy plays, genius obviously

[clifford_thornton]

6 hours ago, ghost of miles said:

I also just remembered that "121 Bank Street" is the title of a David Baker composition on the Russell album At The Five Spot.

haven't dug that LP out in quite some time.

Bill was working as Russell's copyist and there was some talk of him joining the band... this would have been after Ellis' departure and before Russell's Scandinavian sojourn.

[medjuck]

7 hours ago, Captain Howdy said:

Cursive was designed to enable you to correspond professionally in an age before email. Imagine you want to write to ACME Industries to inquire about a job, but you don't own a typewriter. If you have a good cursive hand you can write a letter by hand and not look like a cretin. Now, imagine you're the personnel manager at ACME and you receive two handwritten inquiries, one in elegant cursive and the other in Dolphy's chicken scratch; which makes a better impression?

I remember not long ago I received some piece of advertising in the mail that included a handwritten note, maybe an invitation to an open house or something, and it just looked god-awful: imagine Dolphy's hand in green ink. It had the opposite of the intended effect.

I'd almost only seen cursive until I began teaching at an architecture school. All of the students printed everything (is that what you call it whenm you don't use cursive) and it looked great and was easy to read.  Also they did it very quickly.    Immediately tried to emulate them but my printing was almost as bad as my cursive-- which is to say illegible even by me.