"Robert Francis Prevost, the Chicago-born cardinal selected on Thursday as the new pope, is descended from Creole people of color from New Orleans."

"The pope’s maternal grandparents, both of whom are described as Black or mulatto in various historical records, lived in the city’s Seventh Ward, an area that is traditionally Catholic and a melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European roots. The grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, eventually moved to Chicago in the early 20th century and had a daughter: Mildred Martinez, the pope’s mother. The discovery means that Leo XIV, as the pope will be known, is not only breaking ground as the first U.S.-born pontiff.... It’s unclear whether the new pope has ever addressed his Creole ancestry in public, and his brother said that the family did not identify as Black.... Creoles, also known as 'Creole people of color,' have a history almost as old as Louisiana. While the word Creole can refer to people of European descent who were born in the Americas, it commonly describes mixed-race people of color. Many Louisiana Creoles were known in the 18th and 19th centuries as 'gens de couleur libres,' or free people of color. Many were well educated, French-speaking and Roman Catholic...."

From "New Pope Has Creole Roots in New Orleans/His ancestry, traced to a historic enclave of Afro-Caribbean culture, links Leo XIV to the rich and sometimes overlooked Black Catholic experience in America" (NYT).

ADDED: Haven't there been Popes of mixed race before — in all this long history? Grok offers 3 possibilities:

"We were always taught that we were the best, and so we couldn’t do anything but the best."

Said Duke Ellington's sister Ruth, quoted in "Duke Ellington would be 125. Washington still dances to his tune" (WaPo).

Today, this might sound myopic and perhaps naive, but at the time it was the credo of America’s best-known Black educator, Booker T. Washington. He argued that rather than try to topple an entrenched Jim Crow system, Black people could battle back more effectively through economic improvement, self-help and focused teaching. That is precisely what the D.C. schools were doing in the early 1900s, offering a large dose of Black history and prideful learning to students like Duke Ellington. He remembered his eighth-grade English instructor’s dictum: “Everywhere you go, you’re representing the race. And you command respect. You don’t ask for it. … You command respect with your behavior.” Ellington took that message to heart, the more so since it was reinforced at home. He believed that Black is beautiful and made it a principle to live by, long before it became the mantra of Black activists.

"As the day is long."

I'm exploring the phrase "as the day is long" as a consequence of becoming interested in the word "daylong," which the NYT used to describe the raid on Mar-a-Lago — "the daylong search of the former president’s home." I've been using the word "raid," which I'm sure is utterly correct, because I researched it, when I saw, immediately after the news broke, that it was a talking point to say that it was not a raid. 

That talking point dropped out of the conversation. I didn't even get a chance to use my research: the OED defines "raid" as "A sudden or vigorous attack or descent upon something for the purpose of appropriation, suppression, or destruction; spec. a surprise visit by police to arrest suspects or seize illicit goods."

But that doesn't mean that supporters of the raid want to use the word "raid." There's the word "search," but is that adequate? The NYT seems to have worried that "search" alone called too much attention to the the avoidance of "raid," and — I'm just guessing! — they appended "daylong."

Meade noticed that first, and when he texted the quote to me with the word "daylong" circled, and the note...

For NYT, “raid” = “daylong search” 

I replied:

like it was gentle and leisurely… like a day at the beach 

as legit as the day is long

"I usually suggest Duke Ellington’s arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s 'Nutcracker Suite,' my favorite piece of holiday music..."

Writes the NYT columnist David Leonhardt in email that I could unsubscribe from, but this is clearly excellent enough to stay my hand for the nonce:

"In a way, it’s impossible to review Gold’s staging of 'King Lear,' because, in the arrogance of its conception...."

"Gold has set the play in what I took to be a contemporary universe, but I have no idea why the great hall where Lear (Glenda Jackson) meets with his family to divvy up his kingdom is covered in gold leaf. Are we in a North Korean palace? Trump Tower? A Russian oligarch’s apartment?... Goneril (Elizabeth Marvel, overreaching as usual) has an American twang, while Regan (Aisling O’Sullivan) speaks with an Irish brogue, and Ruth Wilson, doing her very best as Cordelia, and later as the Fool, has clear, British stage diction. Wouldn’t Lear’s daughters have grown up and been educated in the same place? Are their accents meant to indicate that they’ve already retreated into separate territories? Or does Gold mean to telegraph who the daughters 'really' are by giving them their own voices?... [R]ather than allow these actors to do what they do so well, Gold degrades their grace. He has [Pedro] Pascal’s Edmund... simulate a quickie with Goneril, after which she smears his lips with their sexual fluids. Is this a shocking gesture or a 'shocking' gesture? There’s much talk of body parts and copulation in 'King Lear,' as well as a great deal of nasty paternal derision, as when Lear calls his elder daughters 'unnatural hags.' When Glenda Jackson, the butch girl of my dreams from all those incredible seventies movies, utters such lines, the other actors shrink...  In the first half of the play, she is ferocious and loud, grandstanding and bellowing. She calms down in the second half, when Lear’s mind disintegrates, and I wish she could have shown some of that nuance sooner."

The New Yorker's Hilton Als does not like Sam Gold's version of "King Lear." The "butch girl of [his] dreams" just isn't doing it right, for some reason that I suppose I'd have to see the production to understand. The headline extracts Als's point like this: "Sam Gold’s Self-Serving Vision of 'King Lear'/In a new staging, the director uses Shakespeare’s words as a launching pad from which to explore his own theatrical concerns."

Why "Self-Serving"? Gold is pleasing himself and not the audience? But why is the audience disserved? There are so many productions of "King Lear." It's not as if the audience needs one particular approach and not another. At one point, Als asks, "But where do you draw the line between an interpretation that is freeing—and thus freeing to the audience, too—and one that is just frustratingly and bafflingly self-indulgent?" And that's a question I would ask about this review.

Speaking of self-indulgent, Als spends a good part of his column talking about Duke Ellington, whose connection to the subject is nothing more than that he once recorded an album full of instrumentals inspired by Shakespeare plays. It is, according to Als, "a sensual, undulating, and thoughtful album" that shows "the value of great artists’ being driven by the work of other great artists to create something new." So what? That has little to do with putting on a play with actors that have to speak a pre-determined text that has been interpreted and reinterpreted thousands of times.

"Why didn’t Ellington consider his music jazz?"

Kathryn Jean Lopez asks Terry Teachout, who says:

His problem was specifically with the word “jazz,” which for his generation (he was born in 1899) still had strongly sexual connotations. Ellington believed that such ostensibly vulgar labels would prevent jazz from ever being taken seriously by artists, critics, and scholars, so he tried to come up with a different way of referring to the music. At one point, the label he preferred was “Negro folk music.” Needless to say, it never caught on.

Here's Teachout's new book "Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington," which contains the sentence — Teachout's second favorite of his sentences, he says — “He talked not to explain himself but to conceal himself.”

How do we feel about The Who at the Super Bowl?

This is a music act from 40+ years ago. Imagine if in the first Super Bowl, in 1967, the half-time show featured musicians who peaked in 1927. No. It's not imaginable. The strange dominance of My Generation is unfathomable. I hope I die before I get old. Ah ha ha ha. That was just something we said to throw everyone — even ourselves — off the track. We meant to take our stand and dominate as long as we possibly could.

Smile and grin at the change all around... pick up my guitar and play... just like yesterday....

How terribly, terribly strange. I've loved The Who since I first heard "I Can't Explain" on the radio. I was 14. Loved them so much I joined their fan club before their first album was even released in the United States. I'll always love the 60s Who. Even though I got tired of what they were in the 70s, I'm happy to see them still playing now. Pete Townshend is 65. It's cool that he can rotate his arm all around like that, let alone actually pick up his guitar and play. Just like yesterday. The Who, now a duet, takes the gigantic stage.

Ah! I'm getting old. Why don't we all fade away?

IN THE COMMENTS: TheGiantPeach said:

Actually, in 1967, if they had hit on the concept of half-time entertainment that went beyond marching bands, they could very well have featured Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, who were popular 40 years earlier.

In fact, two of the early Super Bowls to feature performers were tributes to Armstrong and Ellington in the year after their deaths. 

John Lennon Day.

ADDED (THOUGH IT SHOULD BE UNNECESSARY): This post is about... well, first, Phil Spector. He's on trial for murder, you know! And second, the absurd notion that there should be a national holiday for every hero. Come on! I love John Lennon, but he shouldn't have his own holiday. Martin Luther King, Jr.... that was special. Basically, there's no Duke Ellington Day, no Louis Armstrong Day, no Bessie Smith Day, no Buddy Holly Day, no Elvis Day. Get it? And John Lennon wasn't even an American! There's only one "Day" for a nonAmerican in America. 2, if you count Christmas. The category is closed.

Bob's flower theme.

Bob's theme today -- on "Theme Time Radio With Bob Dylan" -- was, officially, flowers. But nearly every song was about roses. What happened? Did he start out with roses as the theme and run short? He missed plenty of rose songs, though. He did not play "Kiss From a Rose" or "The Yellow Rose of Texas" or even "some say love, it is a river that drowns the tender reed blah blah blah in the spring becomes the rose." There's "Sally Go Round the Roses" and "Roses Are Red" and "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." There must be a thousand rose songs he didn't play.

To fill in his non-rose slots, he used two grass songs. I don't think grass ought to count as a flower. Then the only other plant/flower I remember him doing was tulips. In keeping with the first syllable of the word, he played two tulip songs. Duke Ellington, "Tulip or Turnip." And Tiny Tim, "Tiptoe Through the Tulips."

I felt that "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" was the emotional high point of the show. We know from reading "Chronicles" that Bob Dylan was friends with Tiny Tim, and introducing the song, he swept aside the superficial view of Tim as just a joke. He was a great historian of music, Dylan said. He knew a lot of songs that were available only on sheet music, and when he died, he took a lot of songs with him. It's not like Tim died in a fire of burning sheet music, so I don't really understand how the music was lost, but it felt very profound and poignant when Dylan said it.

At the end of the show last week, when this week's theme was announced, I tried to guess which songs he'd play. The first flower song that sprang to my mind was that atrocious song about going to San Francisco and making sure you show up already besprigged with flowers. Then I thought of the song that deeply enchanted me when I was a young girl: "Sweet Violets." I wrote about it back here, embedded in a long simulblog of an episode of "American Idol" where the contestants had to sing songs from the year they were born:

I start thinking about what songs would be available to me, if I could be on the show. I'm way too old and I'm a horrible singer, but still ... Here's the list from my year, and my song from that list is "Sweet Violets." I remember hearing it once. I was in bed and overheard my parents playing it. I loved it deeply and the next day asked my parents about it. They told me, it was not for children and I couldn't hear it. Was it about sex? Death? Oddly, though I've always remembered it, I have never bothered to find the song and listen to it. I can still hear it in my head from that one listen, but I've never heard it again. I rush over to iTunes. The Dinah Shore hit is not there (only a Mitch Miller version). Ah! here are the lyrics. It's a bizarrely veiled filthy song from the past! Good thing my parents protected me, or protected themselves from having to deal with my questions.

That's an unusual old song, and it has a flower other that rose, tulip, or grass. Too bad he missed it.

Next week the theme is cars. If I had to bet on one song -- taking into account that Bob likes to tell the life story of the singer -- I'd bet on "Rocket 88." But that wasn't the first car song that popped into my head when I heard the theme. (What was yours?) That was "Little GTO." Looking up the lyrics, I land right on a page of "Muscle Car Songs." Nice! I should have thought of "409" first. My office number was 409 for a long time, and I thought it was really cool that my room number was a Beach Boys song. Students would ask me what my office number was, and I liked to say "It's a Beach Boys song." No one ever said, "409!" But it would have made me happy if they had. I would have picked up good vibrations.

Having found a page of muscle car songs, I think of looking for a page of death car songs. That fateful night the car was stalled upon the railroad track... I couldn't stop, so I swerved to the right... We were buggin' each other while we sat out the light/We both popped the clutch when the light turned green/You shoulda heard the whine from my screamin' machine!... Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!...

Wait. That last one's a motorcycle. Can motorcycles get in on the car theme -- the way grass got in on the flower theme? Or it motorcycle crashing a very special theme for Bob, due for it's own show some day.

The latest in Duke Ellington CDs.

My wonderful colleague Stewart Macaulay sends out advice about buying Duke Ellington records to the faculty email list here at the University of Wisconsin Law School. I keep telling him he should start a blog for this sort of thing. But since he hasn't, I asked if I could reprint his email here. He said yes. So here's the latest missive from Prof. Macaulay:

Several people have asked that I keep you up to date on Duke Ellington CDs. If you couldn't care less, stop reading now.

There is a brand new never before issued release on the Danish Storyville label called "The Jaywalker." These are recordings from 1966-67 and part of the collection of stuff that Mercer Ellington gave to Danish radio. Some of the cuts are things that appeared on other CDs such as "Rue Bleu,"" Chromatic Love Affair" and Billy Strayhorn's "Blood Count." It also includes music for the play "The Jaywalker," a religious allegory "about the boy Mac (Mac meaning Son of) trying to have the traffic on the highway stopped so that people living on either side of the road could cross freely." I think the music is better than the concept for the play.

At the other extreme, there is the Bluebird release called "The Centennial Collection: Duke Ellington," which goes back to the original "Black and Tan Fantasy" and "East St. Louis Toodle-O." But it also has such classics as "Ko Ko" and "Concerto for Cootie" (which later became "Do Nothing 'Till You Hear It From Me."). It includes 7 previously unissued tracks from 1940s radio broadcasts. Also included in a DVD with films of the Ellington orchestra playing.

Finally, there is one that many of you might like. It is "Duke Ellington's Jazz Violin Session." It is on Wounded Bird Records WOU 1688. (It originally was released in 1976 on Atlantic). It feaures Svend Asmussen on viola and Stephane Grappelli and Ray Nance on violins. The tunes are classic Ellington, such as "In a Sentimental Mood," "Don't Get Around Much Any More," "Day Dream" and "Cotton Tail." This music was recorded in 1963 for Reprise, the then new label formed by Frank Sinatra when he decided to eliminate all the middle men and make off with more of the money from recording. He engaged Ellington as his jazz A & R man. Warner Brothers bought Reprise and didn't release much of what Ellington had recorded. Of course, the mid-1960s was a time when people weren't listening to much jazz. I have found myself putting this one on over and over. The strings playing this music are different and nice.

I got all of these from Tower records on line. (www.towerrecords.com) I assume that they are available elsewhere as well. The nice thing about Tower is that you can switch to recent releases in order without having to go through everything as you do on Amazon.com.