Finds: January 9, 2014

Shorty Rogers and His Giants playing "Martian Bossa Nova" on the KTLA TV series Frankly Jazz, hosted by prominent jazz disk jockey Frank Evans during the 1962-1963 season:



Sort of a West Coast equivalent of Art Ford's Jazz Party, which I've written about here at PMD. KTLA was an independent commercial station - isn't it delightful to think that a show like this could be created somewhere other than public television? That era is long gone, but it is still good to think about and to re-visit.
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Carrie Hagen, "The Story Behind the First Ransom Note in American History" at Past Imperfect:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2013/12/the-story-behind-the-first-ransom-note-in-american-history/

The headline caught my eye because I assumed it referred to the 1874 kidnapping of 4-year-old Charley Ross in Philadelphia, and so it proved to be. Hagen is the author of a recent book on the case, We Is Got Him: The Kidnapping that Changed America:

http://www.amazon.com/We-Is-Got-Him-Kidnapping/dp/1590200861/

There is an excellent earlier book on the Ross kidnapping, Norman Zierold's 1967 Little Charley Ross: The Shocking Story of America's First Kidnapping for Ransom, which I happen to have read and which I heartily recommend:

http://www.amazon.com/Little-Charley-Ross-Americas-Kidnapping/dp/B000GO0QP4/

Charley Ross was never found, and no one knows if he was killed or perhaps survived - many claimants came forward over the years, all of them rejected by the Ross family.
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A 1987 interview with the Montana novelist Ivan Doig from the Book Beat archives:

http://www.wiredforbooks.org/ivandoig/index.htm

The full-length author interviews in the archive were done by Don Swaim for CBS Radio, but never aired in their entirety; the actual segments were two minutes or less. The archive is an amazing resource:

http://www.wiredforbooks.org/swaim/

Back in the Eighties I read three of Doig's books - his first two novels, The Sea Runners and English Creek, and the non-fiction Winter Brothers - and thought they were wonderful; he has published much since then, and I should get back to him. He is a thoroughly charming interviewee. It is interesting to learn that he was a great friend of the excellent Native American novelist and fellow Montanan James Welch (1940-2003), whose Winter in the Blood I have read twice (but not his other four novels yet).
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Photojournalist Fernando Brito works for the newspaper El Debate in my current home-town of Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico. Although El Debate is one of the classier papers in town - there are several more sordid ones in the category of "el noto rojo," or blood news - Brito's work still brings him into frequent contact with death scenes, which he also shoots as an art photographer. A show of his work, "Your Steps Were Lost in the Landscape," is currently at the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon:

http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-21731-your_steps_were_lost_in_the_landscape.html

A slideshow can be found at the gallery's website:

http://www.blueskygallery.org/exhibition/fernando-brito/#1

These pictures are very different in tone than, say, Weegee's famous crime scene photos. Because they are in gentle color rather than in black-and-white, and composed for beauty rather than for tabloid immediacy, the effect is contemplative and infinitely sad.