Talking hockey, Twitter, and the bane of humanity that is the "should of" people. 

Writing for JazzTimes: "There is an abiding paradox to the life of Billie Holiday, which is the core tenet of her art: In theory you should feel bad for her, and yet it borders upon the impossible to do so. She’s overleaping will packaged in a vessel of transcendence."

BBC TV horror, "Can't Buy Me Love," baseball Hall of Faming voting, the Stooges live in 1970.

The Remains, Johnny Dollar, Marx Brothers, Wayne Gretzky. 

The best part of Handel's Messiah. "It’s but a repeated word, sounded again and again, and yet, with Handel’s lived-in genius for tone painting, the word “Amen” seems to  encase the very nature of possibility itself. To contain, paradoxically, the infinite. Or to point — melodically — to whatever the infinite can best represent in our lives."

Seabury Quinn's Arkham House treasure, Roads. "Weird fiction, as the Arkham masters like Quinn delivered it, didn’t need to feature ghosts or the otherworldly. The invention quota had to be high, but perhaps the key tenant is that there would be no  disclaimers that you needed to accept a certain set of rules divorced  from the reality we know, as these disclaimers undercut potency."

Stellar five-part radio episode of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar; Elvis; Duke Ellington. 

"Fitzgerald and Berlin (or West Berlin, as it was once called) go way back—to the eve of Valentine’s Day 1960, when she cut a live album there that infused swing and the American songbook with scat stylings that were as bracing as Picasso’s forays into synthetic cubism. On to March 25, 1962: Fitzgerald has come to Berlin once more. In her mid-forties, she’s in the early portion of what will be an extended vocal prime. Tapes are made, tapes are then lost, and thanks to the swinging rainbow, they have found us again."

Duke Ellington and The Nutcracker. "There is a rhythm to ballet music that inevitably puts images in your mind of human movement, even if you’ve not actually seen the ballet in question. Movement is ingrained in the music; otherwise the music  wouldn’t serve its true purpose. Remember, Ellington wrote for  ballrooms, to get people moving, and I bet you he and Pyotr could have had a merry glass or two of the nog together, discussing the ways in which their respective approaches to dance music overlap."

"I Saw Three Ships," Christmas episodes of Frasier and Newhart, the Quiet, Please episode, "Berlin, 1945," and Art Tatum.

On the excellent and rarely discussed V-Discs. "A spring spritzing of opening notes, a soft blanket of billowing, burnt-fog triplets, and then Tatum sticks the riff in a way that I’ve never heard anyone play it before. He nails it, lands upon it, as he keeps it moving, sidles that riff right on into your kitchen. The ear doesn’t expect it in that precise moment but it feels bidden all the same, a riff with a built-in understanding of 'now would be the best time for a visit.'”

John Lennon, scary radio, Judy Garland, Christmas carols. 

The power of "Help!" "We all spend a lot of energy trying to show others—and ourselves—how  well we’re doing. And simultaneously convince ourselves, too. 'Help!' is  the opposite of this, a full-out airing of real feeling."

How to get through a lonely Thanksgiving. "There were times in the past when I’d sit and drink on Thanksgiving and  watch bad Christmas movies, but a few years ago I said, 'right, surely  we can manage better than this.'”

Conversation about new fiction, Dylan, Rudolph. 

A piece about Dylan's long songs. "It isn’t easy to do this kind of thing and not have it be a repetitive  grind. The musical backing doesn’t change a ton — in fact, there’s not a  single modulation in these performances. They are not jams —  that backing needs to be arresting from the jump and remain so.  Musicality in the vocal is crucial — an excitement of forms of phrasing — because the voice becomes the central instrument."

A short story about a man who is not dead who nonetheless has a ghost he must look after called "Post-Fletcher." 

Talking about Matthew Lewis, Led Zeppelin, Quiet, Please, and Hammer horror. 

Interview about the new novel, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satircal (Short) Novel of the Last Bro.

Radiohead’s Kid A, Val Lewton’s The Body Snatcher, the Who’s 1975 North American tour, and John Atkinson Grimshaw’s November Moonlight.

Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" 200 years later. "Irving loaded up the atmospherics—you can all but smell the forest carpet, hear the owls—but he also mastered a kind of “gather ’round” tone, a convivial beckoning. He had a disconcerting story to relay, but it would serve you well if you understood its warning: Be not thine own self-haunter!"

On identity and becoming a writer via Linus and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and Val Lewton’s touching and beautiful horror film, The Curse of the Cat People. "That great sincerity is the quality he believes, above all, the Great Pumpkin looks for when choosing a pumpkin patch to visit each year, is telling. He only visits the one. The Great Pumpkin isn’t even a Great Pumpkin; it is that which is unique to us and germinates in us with our assistance. The Great Pumpkin in Linus’s yard is the Dragon with a Hoodie somewhere in a city, or the Elf King in, I don’t know, Prague. Or, sometimes, the friend who comes to visit us, whom we did not expect."

Macbeth! Scariest episodes of The Twilight Zone. Bob Dylan on All Hallows’ Eve in 1964. And—are ghosts real?

New piece on Théodore Géricault‘s 1819 painting, The Raft of the Medusa. "Géricault’s 16 x 23-foot painting featured figures both large and larger than life. He was prepped to the gills with his grim studies, and knew, better than any artist ever had, how human flesh de-colored as it decayed. A strange specialty, for certain, akin to what an artist might pursue in an Edgar Allan Poe story, but Géricault would have told you that human nature supplied his sensationalism — he just recorded it, as a poet might try to replicate the song of a bird."

Discussing Halloween episodes of Cheers and The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” the intertextual wittiness of “Monster Mash,” and Orson Welles in 1949’s Black Magic.