Tuesday 1/7/25
Don't rob one book to pay another.
Someone could say to me, "Of course you're all about moving forward, you've had a terrible life to date, there's nothing you'd want to go back to," and while that is true, I'd say what I say about moving forward all the same because it's what I believe and how I think it has to be if you're living the right way and/or you are creating art.
As we know, as we've discussed, people love to say they're old. "Want to feel old?" How many posts and comments do we encounter like that? "The thing they don't tell you about turning thirty is everything aches in the morning." People flock to this shit. Huge appeal for them. Old old old. Which really means, "I don't have to try, here's my excuse, lazy, simple fuck that I am."
And yet, when someone dies at the age of, say, sixty-seven, what do we see?
"So young."
Telling, isn't it?
Stendhal wrote to Delacroix advising him to neglect nothing that can make you great. This is true. But if one does this and one is great and always becoming greater, every part of one's life will be hard and becoming harder. It will be torture and worse than torture. The greatest challenge for the person of greatness is to solve the problem of this reality so that the torture becomes its opposite and also reality.
Very few people are capable of understanding--or would never understand on their own--how much that "nothing" can include. There are tends of thousands of contributing potentialities to each human life every day.
Some new year's things.
I recently published eleven film pieces. Two more were moved some days ago. The latter two were rather lengthy works on the Beatles and footage of their "A Day in the Life" orchestral recording session via Stan Brakhage and how Leo McCarey's so-called most depressing movie ever, Make Way for Tomorrow, is actually an uplifting work of art. The latter piece will be going into my book of film writings, Watching Back--it's an excellent piece.
The first two works of fiction of the year are done. They are called "Frigid Bitch"--which, as I've mentioned, is likely for There Is No Doubt: Story Girls--and "Vernon," which may be for Longer on the Inside: Very Short Fictions of Infinitely Human Lives or More Life Yet: Endless Stories of Briefest Duration or Become Your Own Superhero: Intrepid Exceptions to Modern Fiction. I will have to mull. Regarding the latter, though: I very much like that idea of "exceptions." Stories haven't been called that before, and certainly not in a title.
Downloaded Mosaic's eight disc Kid Ory set The Complete Verve Sessions and a number of Bear Family boxes: Smiley Lewis's Shame, Shame, Shame (rock and roll fans may know him as the singer of "One Night," which Elvis covered so memorably, especially in the multiple versions for his 1968 Comeback Special) and three featuring the work of Ricky Nelson: The American Dream, For You: The Decca Years 1963-1969, The Last Time Around 1970-1982. Also, Tommy James and the Shondells' The Complete Roulette Recordings 1966-1973 and The Complete Roulette Albums (lots of overlap). I hold "I Think We're Alone Now" in high esteem. A reissue of the Animals' first (UK) album, too (whose "fire escape" type of cover is quite similar to that of the Yardbirds' Five Live Yardbirds, but from the other side). Animals note: The two-disc The Complete Animals (which covers the Mickie Most years) has long numbered among my core favorite albums. The Best of the Animals was one of the first albums with which I fell in love out on Cape Cod. As for the UK debut: Quite the moving starting it with "The Story of Bo Diddley."
Regarding "One Night"--Lewis sings "I never did no wrong" on the bridge. Elvis added a third negative: "I ain't never did no wrong." You actually get two different meanings--in the first instance, the singer is saying--with the double negative--that he did wrong; in the second, with the triple negative, what the singer is actually saying is he didn't do anything wrong.
I saw The Thin Man at the Brattle. Watched the fourth series of Brassic. The episode, "The Unexpected Guest," is the show's best. The scene at the alcoholic father's house is powerful. The show doesn't work as well in the fifth series. The quality across the board is down. You can tell when shows become a different show that work much less well.
With Newhart, it happened after the first season but all the more so after the second season. With Fraser, it happened after Niles and Daphne paired up, and no, that's not the reason why, I'm just stating when the change to broad characterizations and less incisive writing occurred and it became more like some low-hanging fruit sitcom. Some shows are never as good as they were at a certain point and change in that way and also, to a degree, in the manner in which I'm speaking, but are still good. The first season of Cheers is so good, and so Cheers, that other seasons are less good and less Cheers, if that makes sense.
Pieces I need to write in quick succession are those about Jerry Lee Lewis's 1964 live albums, Chuck Berry's "The Promised Land," the soundtrack to Bride of Frankenstein, D.W. Griffith, the Beatles' BBC cover of Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," the Beatles' Cavern Club sessions, the television program Around the Beatles, and the Beach Boys' "Don't Worry Baby." I have been watching this stunning program featuring Little Richard and the Shirelles and I should write about that, too, if feasible. "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" is a towering song and a defining single of its age. Shirley Owens: damn.
The Lusty Men was on TCM Saturday. Watched some. Nicholas Ray's best film perhaps, as I've suggested. An uneven, oft-over-praised filmmaker.
I need to take things out of The Root of the Chord: Writings on Jazz's Essential Power and Artistry and Just Like Them: A Piece by Piece Guide to Becoming the Ultimate Thinking Person's Beatles Fan and really tighten them up. They can stand to get shorter, even as I add things to the latter book but that should be less than what comes out. Of a piece and tight. That's the idea.
I've done okay with fitness, nothing outstanding. Been averaging more than 100 push-ups a day but my consistency hasn't been what it needs to be. The other day I was at the Monument early and the ranger let me in to start before they open but he couldn't get the door to the Monument open--the cold makes it harder to work the lock--and had to wait until his colleague got there and for a while it was just me sitting in the dark of the mini-museum at the base of the obelisk. A fitting visual in this journey I'd say.
I thought about Bloomsbury and that Intimate Objects series and what I am going to have to do on here. Not good. And what ends up being not what anyone wants and is always there and added on to. It follows you around for good. But I must do what I must do. When I have you bang to rights, I have you bang to rights. I've been putting this off because it's so blatant and what is going to happen as a result will be ugly. It's not what I like to do. But what I want to do and what I must do are almost always two very different things right now in my life and usually can't be further apart.
Watched the Celtics lose to the Thunder, and what I can say so far about the NBA this season is that both the Thunder and the Cavaliers are better teams than the Celtics. I don't know if the Celtics think they're going to flip some switch, but it's not like they didn't play hard last night. I think people are wildly presumptuous with how they talk about this team as being so much better than everyone else. They're not. There are better teams than them right now. The Thunder played some stifling defense and they're good in crunch time.
Apple TV was free over the weekend. I watched a few minutes of Shrinking and that was all I needed to know that it was inauthentic and forced and I needn't watch any more.
The US won the World Juniors in OT, and I'm sorry to say I'd fallen asleep. I'd been going since like two in the morning. I did see a bit of the bronze medal game, though, and all of the fourteen-round shootout. It's interesting--breakaways are easier for attacking players in games. They have a better chance of scoring. Whereas, it's a lot harder to score, it seems, in shootouts, and I'm sure the numbers back this up. And in the games those aren't usually uncontested breakaways. There are back checkers. You're contending with someone right behind you, sticks.
Tyreek Hill is a bad teammate, eh? Quit on his team Sunday, then bashed team right after the game and said he was moving on. He won what he was going to win when he was part of a top-tier operation. That operation kept rolling without him. He's not going to help you win at this point in his career--and that was a one-off of an operation in Andy Reid, Patrick Mahomes, and the Chiefs--and I wouldn't want him anywhere near my team, even though my team has nothing in the wide receiver cupboard.
With the aforementioned two stories being done, I turn my attention back to the revision of "Dead Thomas," which stands at 6300 words as of now. Last night I lay in bed thinking about There Is No Doubt. I have so much more work still to do. Decisions to make. But especially time and effort to put in. I don't want the time to take too much time which means focus and efficiency. I am trying to get everything exactly right but I'm letting things go on too long by not attending to them in the orderly, compact way I ought to be attending to them. I'm just kind of doing them when I'm do them. What then occurs when you are doing 500 things at once is that things--the larger things, project-wise--aren't getting finished. They're always in a state of getting done rather than being done. In one regard, this delay arises from my knowledge that it doesn't much matter right now whether I'm done or not, given the situation I'm in and how everything stand, both me-wise and world-wise. I can't use that as an excuse, though, and even if it is true I can't act like it's true or give in to it being true or not try to conduct myself so that it might not be true if I am finished and have what I have.
Hoping to have a big issue resolved in the next few days so that one thing that has been slowing me down won't be doing such any longer.
Spoke to the webmaster as well and intending to get going on that front--fronts, actually--and tending to what has so long needed tending to and also putting some new things in motion.
Sunday marked 3101 days, or 443 weeks, without a drink. I ran five circuits in the Monument that afternoon. For the past few days it was in the upper twenties with the weather app saying it felt like fourteen degrees. That's always a strange concept, isn't it? What if it felt like twenty-eight to you? Felt like fourteen to who? The wind definitely made it colder, though, and it wasn't super pleasant going across the bridge in workout clothes either heading out or coming back wet--the bridge is a winter jacket spot on such days. Yesterday I ran 3000 stairs at City Hall and did 150 push-ups and must get back out there--it's colder still today--before getting the train for the dentist this morning. This is a shot from the bridge coming back Sunday with the airport off to the left (the east). You can make out a plane.
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