Grinding

Monday 8/9/21

I have decided to remain optimistic about the Red Sox. I figure, resiliency has been their thing/theme, so let's see. If you really have balls and guts, you inevitably prove it. Though perhaps I'm projecting something from my own life there.

I ran 5000 more stairs.

I need like a half dozen books to go and go fast. Enough of this. More books need to be in a schedule to come out. Cheer Pack, Longer on the Inside, There Is No Doubt, the essay collection, two or three music books.

I finished a 2500 word piece on Miles Davis's live albums. Excerpt:

"Miles Davis at Newport 1955-1975: The Bootleg Series Vol. 4

Our focus here is on the 1958 set-by-the-sea with the Kind of Blue line-up. When you think of them, it’s almost always a studio band, because how could you not? But let’s pretend that summer has a sound. Summer in New England has a sound. The sea can sing to the shore such that the two fall in love with each other—hard. Sunlight has a sound when the spray of ocean salt dances within its rays. For me, this set encapsulates those sounds. It’s as if Kind of Blue is an item in a store that has caught the fancy, and finally been purchased and brought home, and now shimmers with even greater sensory appeal out in the domestic world. Davis and pianist Bill Evans shared a melodic ethos, and melody is the emphasis, with Trane also following suit, in telling contrast to those springtime 1960 gigs. Pure euphonic delight. Pass the sunscreen."

I have a plan with this Beatles Get Back docu-series in November, to do three pieces. I'm working hard to make that happen. I'l write about the series, straight-up, which is what I'm doing for The Daily Beast. I want to do a piece on the Let It Be film, which most Beatles fans have never even seen. And then also a piece on redressing the myth that the Get Back sessions produced mostly just crap, when there are real nuggets to be discovered. Paul McCartney singing "Strawberry Fields Forever," for example, and looks back at the material they played on the BBC in 1963. And this version of "Black Dog"--not the Zeppelin song--with Carl Perkins' "Right String Wrong Yo-Yo" incorporated and a touch of "Run for Your Life." One also detect the origins of Lennon's "Crippled Inside."