Tuesday 3/4/25
Art is most of all that I care about, because in art is everything and art is the only thing that is enough for me. Anything else doesn't come up to the mark for what I need, but art does.
Book the first of my writings on rock and roll will be called Double Tracked: The Art of Writing About the Art of Rock and Roll. Took me a while to figure that out.
The News section (and the Op-eds section--there are still hundreds of links to get up in most of the others) of the site has no been brought up to date after a couple months of neglect. There was an op-ed in the New York Daily News on the Beatles' "In My Life."
The singer of this song has no age. They’re not a man in his twenties, they’re not some hermit on the hill with decades of accrued answers. They are a man only in the sense of vocal timbre; this is love’s spirit in musical form. The elegiac sweep involves the clearing away of detritus. What we might call “the noise” today; less of a blocking out than a waving away with the hand to get to that which most matters.
Another on Rod Serling and nostalgia.
I am an anti-nostalgia man. I loathe nostalgia because I think when we dwell on what was, we forsake what can be. If you spend too much time in the past, you will lose yourself in something that doesn’t exist, and with that you risk losing your reason, your ability to deal with what is real in the here and now.
Having given one of the most electrifying performances in all of cinema with Frankenstein—if you know, you know, as they say—Boris Karloff downshifted into subdued mode to play Ardath Bey, the man late of the Egyptian embalming table who has now come back to life in the twentieth century. Such is the efficacy of Jack Pierce’s makeup and the staging of the film’s opening scene, that we tend to forget that nowhere else in the picture does Karloff appear in full-on mummy mode. Think of how many kids have gone out trick or treating with that Pierce/Karloff as the inspiration for their costume or recall when you wrapped yourself in bandages, stuck our your arms and made them go stiff, and scared your sister shitless. That’s staying power.
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Jason Evers is the scientist who drove too fast and now won’t let go, and Virginia Leith plays the head, which is mounted on a table and just kind of sits there and squawks about wanting to die, because what else is it going to do? But fear not—the bad doctor has a plan to find himself a ripping hot young bod, cut off its owner’s head, and fuse that bitchin’ chassis with the talking head he’s already got. Sounds reasonable.
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Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 film Le Corbeau is our finest horror film in which the epistle is central. The crow of the title is a master of the poisoned-pen missive. We have an affair, abortions, and plenty of gossip, all of which, actually, sounds rather like high school—alas. This is a film of dirt and the dirt that kills. Clouzot was a screw-tightener after Henry James’s own heart. His horror films feel like thrillers and also locked-room mysteries, no matter that an entire town becomes embroiled in what the crow is up to. Unease prevails. No one trusts anyone else.
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When Hammer came along in the 1950s and decided to inject some lust into the monster tales of yore, they channeled something of Tovar’s performance. There’s a sense of risk-taking to Melford’s Dracula. His team cut loose in ways that Browning and company might have sought to avoid. The stasis ended up working for the American version; that and the movie’s timing, being made as it was after the death of silents and before musical soundtracks came sweeping in. Browning’s Dracula—in one of cinema’s greatest oxymoronic coups—almost entirely interstitial, which makes it feel otherworldly. The luck of the calendar was involved. Melford—who was actually on set during the day observing Browning—appeared to be actuated by designs, plans, the desire to translate a vision to cinema.
A 5400 word piece in Bright Lights Film Journal on Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow, one of his two films from 1937 (the other being The Awful Truth, which won McCarey the best director Oscar--more on what he thought about that decision in the piece).
That sounds like we might be getting something diluted. We are not. Rather, the converse, and yet the movie achieves its unique emotional intensity without aggression. We tend to think of the worst blows as being dramatic and heated in nature, violent. The cup is dashed to the ground, the storm clouds reverberate with thunder, the match gets put to the fuse. Crash, crack, boom.
Best Classic Band pieces on Rankin-Bass's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the Beach Boys' "Wild Honey" and "Don't Worry Baby."
The homosexual imagery and language is plain and to see it throughout Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer doesn’t make one some dry academic on the hunt for that which is not there. Look where Hermey stands—right beneath the undercarriage—of the Abominable Snowman after relieving him of his teeth, which has its own implication. Note Rudolph’s posture—his derriere is the crux of the composition, smack in the middle of of your TV set—as he gets a drink from a pond. There’s a character named Fireball. Three guys—once Yukon Cornelius makes the duo a trio—share a bed in a cozy cottage with snow flowers. In proto-Deliverance fashion, the gay elf squeals— strategically—like a pig.
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The fun is infectious. It’s akin to being a child and watching your friends playing in the yard across the street through your window and deliriously asking your mother if you can go out and play as well. We’re a part of these proceedings. For all of its grandeur, Pet Sounds could feel like it was leaving a listener behind, or that it was under glass—there, but separate. Wild Honey features music you can all but touch, throw around like a scuffed up, beloved ball that’s lost none of its bounce.
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The singer in some of Buddy Holly’s songs would give you the straight-up lowdown on what he was going through and feeling, but it made for a shocking moment in the evolution of popular songwriting when Wilson’s narrator says, “I guess I should have kept my mouth shut/When I started to brag about my car”—a boast to impress the singer’s peers, and likely this young woman with whom he’s besotted. We sense that this was an earlier period in their relationship, before the putting of such childish things behind him. We recognize that concept—expressed so lucidly from the Bible—but you don’t expect to encounter a living example of the idea within a pop song.
A Baltimore Sun op-ed on Rankin-Bass's 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.
I still rock out with tunes like “Even a Miracle Needs a Hand,” which has always struck me as true enough. Everyone and everything needs a hand, and if ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas has a thesis—and life itself—it is that.
An op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the simultaneous inflexibility and malleability of time.
We’re told that time heals all. Well, yes and no. Time isn’t mending your broken heart. You’re just forgetting. Life is happening. We cede an awful lot of power to time. Do you know anyone who doesn’t tell you they’re busy? It’s like we make time our overlords and then boast about who rules us.
And so forth.
The horror pieces will be in the book of horror film writings, at least one of the Beach Boys pieces will be in Double Tracked, and the McCarey piece will likely be the first piece in my first book of (non-horror) film writings. Find me a better film piece than that one.
More and more you see people making like nothing existed before they did, though each person exists for but a blip temporally. As soon as I could read I was learning about things that happened thousands of years before I entered the world. I have always sought out interesting things. I go to where the interesting things are. That has always been my criteria.
Our world is dominated by shallowness. It's almost exclusively shallow. Art is rarely produced because we are shallow. The creation of art requires being born with outsized ability, and then work constantly, with vision and focus, to harness that ability. People don't have this in them now. They used to more people who were this way, in part because there were others and society as a whole wasn't as shallow.
Presently you have to go against the grain of everything and everyone to create art. Now, that art may be for everyone--mine is--but the creating of it will require a person to do what no one else does. That means on your own. Without a team or much if anything in the way of support and encouragement, and often the opposite. People don't have that in them. Not for a long time now, and less every day, if that's even possible.
It's not that I am old and so I like things from before "my time" as a result of seeking out things from my own life and chronology. Most of the art by others that I'm passionate about predates my entry into this world, and like I said above, sometimes by thousands of years. Hundreds. Twenty. Whatever it may be.
I listened to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan when I was seventeen and I knew it was art. I didn't care that it was from 1963 and I didn't not look for it because it was made before I was born. I wasn't looking to my immediate left and right. I just go where the interesting things are. "When" they are has nothing to do with it, but you'll find practically nothing of artistic value--or that's even competently made--in our world.
Universal sent me a set of that Beatles US albums in mono box.
I don't listen to many podcasts--I have several that I plan to, but I don't get around to it and it's not like they're going anywhere probably--but I do always make a point of listening to the M.R. James-themed A Podcast to the Curious, which is actually cited in a footnote in my Scrooge book. They put out an episode about Lucy Boston's (the author of the Green Knowe children's series) short story, "Curfew," which I heard recently.
Been reading a number of locked room mysteries: Edmund Crispin's "Beware of the Trains," Fredrc Brown's "The Laughing Butcher," Edward D. Hoch's "The Man from Nowhere."
With my free trial of Apple TV+ I tried to watch Silo and Ted Lasso as I had earlier tried to watch Shrinking, and as with the latter, I can't do it. I believe people just haven't experienced that much so they'll say what they say about what they do experience. I have kept up with Severance, but it's nothing special. The gambit was solid, but it quickly just became another love story thing. One of the show's problems is that it under-utilizes what might be it's two most interesting characters--Irving and Dylan. Especially Dylan. Irving is given a bit more plot space. If Dylan had been gay instead and Irving wasn't then it would have been the other way around. They weren't going to focus too much on the issues of severance with another straight couple.
Downloaded some great items: various albums of early American Christmas music, Mosaic's The Complete Atlantic and EMI Jazz Recordings of Shorty Rogers, the Super Deluxe Edition of the Jam's Setting Sons, the Chantels' Maybe, the complete works of Corelli, the Honeycombs' Have I the Right: The Complete 60s Albums and Singles, Our Generation: 75 Mod Classics, March of the Mods: The Roots of Northern Soul, An Evening in Sapsucker Woods (1958 album of natural sounds), Freddy King's Heads Up: The First Fourteen Singles, the Super Deluxe Edition of Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous, Muddy Waters' The Chess Singles Collection and his complete plantation recordings, the Champs' Tequila!, The R&B Hits of 1953, Rockin', Boppin', an LP of Brendan Behan discussing James Joyce, Groovin' & Bluesin': Hot Instrumental Hits 1956-1962, She Came from Liverpool: Merseyside Girl-Pop 1962-1968, Def Leppard's The Early Years, Raw - Early BBC Recordings, Don Valley Stadium 1993, Mosaic's The Complete Illinois Jacquet Sessions 1945-50, the Weavers' 1949-1953 Goodnight Irene, NPR's radio adaptations of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, Steve Reich's Works, 1965-1995, volumes one through eight of Duke Ellington's Ellington in Order, the complete The Six Shooter radio series, all of the canonical Clive Merrison Sherlock Holmes radio adaptations, Smithsonian Folkways' The Sounds of the Junk Yard, Big Box of Surfin' USA, Mosaic's The Complete Pacific Jazz Studio Recordings of the Chet Baker Quartet with Russ Freeman, Ella Fitzgerald's The Moment of Truth: Ella at the Coliseum, and a crankin' audio tape of the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore East from 6/14/68 that could go head-to-head on the metal front with the Who during this period for them.
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