The IRS, editors, the Genius Lives Matter movement, John Huston's Moby Dick, the 1965 NME Pollwinners concert, the Beatles' "I Am the Walrus," the singular baseball career of Max Bishop, a Cam Newton op-ed, sports logos. We try to keep these descriptions tonally neutral, but this is obviously a person who is better on radio than anyone has ever been. Maybe someone should get their head out of their ass and hire this fellow for a lot of money? Maybe not everyone has to suck at what they do? Maybe there can be something merit-based in this society? How about just one thing? 

Covering the John Coltrane JazzTimes feature, the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star," M.R. James's short story "The Mezzotint" as read by Michael Hordern, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, the sci-fi film The Monolith Monsters, and Charlie Watts. 

2500 word piece on John Coltrane's Ascension album. "Marion Brown reportedly said later that the musicians were actually screaming as they played, and he couldn’t understand how those screams didn’t appear on the tape, as if a skillful engineer had sliced away the evidence. Perhaps the recollection is apocryphal, but it tracks: Ascension is music to bellow to, part Munch’s The Scream figure via postmodern big band, part Whitman’s barbaric yawp amplified to a pitch that could strip the soil from the earth and the epipelagic zone off the sea."

Interview about new pieces in JazzTimes and The Smart Set on Scott LaFaro and Toni Morrison respectively, the real key to any quality writing, a useless literary agent, baseball, The Golden Girls, a Bob Dylan concert from 1964, the Rolling Stones at Leeds University in 1971, the 1953 sci-fi film, Invaders from Mars. 

On Toni Morrison's novel Jazz, and jazz itself. "This felt less like reading, more like pressing play on the stereo. It  also felt like filling up a future dance card; it wasn’t necessarily the  time in life for me to explore the world of the Hot Fives and Hot  Sevens and chase my own teen blues away with some of Bessie Smith’s  brand, but I knew that the moment would come, and jazz would be a part  of my future. Until then, I hung with Toni Morrison."

Discussing the new personal essay in Salmagundi about running the stairs of the Bunker Hill Monument, John Huston's Key Largo, a rare Ritchie Valens live album, and the five best Red Sox of all-time. 

Our post-reality world, the exit of the Bruins' David Krejci, Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, the Stones' Between the Buttons, an amateur film club production of M.R. James's classic ghost story, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad." 

Talking about episodes of X Minus One and Quiet, Please, the latest op-ed in the New York Daily News, guys who are closer to baseball's Hall of Fame than you think, guys who are further away than you think, and the Who's Who's Next. 

Piece on the Cleveland baseball team's new moniker and our play-it-safe-and-push-crap-forward culture. "Whenever we attempt to play it safe, and play not to lose, inevitably we  do just that. Were it possible to simultaneously fall on our faces and  backsides, we’d complete that particular tricky mission. The need not to  offend means that we produce so much dreck. I’ll take it further: so  much work, product, entertainment — there’s hardly art anymore — that  just flat out sucks."

On the great recordings bassist Scott LaFaro made apart from the Bill Evans Trio. "On December 19 and 20, he took part in John Lewis, Gunther Schuller, and Jim Hall’s Jazz Abstractions sessions, with buddy Bill Evans and Eric Dolphy. What a natural setting  for a multi-ecosystem guy like LaFaro, the dream bassist for a project  of this nature, which is jazz, classical, painterly, open yet  demonstrative."

Talking about the Babe Ruth piece, Laurel and Hardy's Blotto, a cool animated pilot for adults that wasn't picked up, Orson Welles, and radio horror. 

Piece in The Smart Set on the greatest--and smartest--season a baseball player has ever had. "He looked like a man who ate eight eggs for breakfast, developed his arm  muscles with manual labor in the offseason, and had spindly, even  dainty, legs. One could even say that Ruth sported a proto-Dad bod."

The latest issue of Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature contains a recent short story called "Captains' Practice."

Talking about the Grateful Dead's Skull Fuck LP, least favorite sports, 1975's The Big Sleep, Johnny Dollar, writing tips

Covering The Golden Girls, a five-part Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar episode, Dave Kingman, Laurel and Hardy's Sons of the Desert, and double play combos. 

Talking about the Grateful Dead's "Uncle John's Band," the Band's Moondog Matinee, Creature from the Black Lagoon, the most all-American baseball seasons by player and team, and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado."

A conversation about giving up alcohol five years ago, 12 Angry Men, a filmed performance by Cream in 1968, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, and the fiction of Daniil Kharms. 

A piece on the BBC's 1970 ecological feminist horror film, Robin Redbreast. "Pastoral horror is a distinctly English, Irish, and Scottish phenomenon. There’s a transposition at work, where those hauntings we usually associate with ancient castles and aged horrors take a kind of field trip, and steep into the earth, accrete into trees, are gathered up in the brush alongside what ought to be the peaceful rill."

The significance of Negro League stats officially becoming a part of MLB history. "What matters is that Josh Gibson, and so many amazing players like him — and the average players, the less-than-average players — feel real. Venerated as special, as more skilled than at this craft than you, me, and all of our friends, in all probability, who played ball at whatever level we played it."

Talking about the Grateful Dead's "Box of Rain," the Beatles' first BBC session from March 1962, Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, and the Hall of Fame career of catcher Gary Carter. 

The good folks at the New Haven Review have put up a personal essay in full called "A Carrot for Dennis." (Scroll down to Issue 024 to download the issue and access the Pdf--the essay starts on page 92.) The piece is in Glue God: Essays (and Tips) for Repairing a Broken Self. "When you walk on the sides of roads most people do not walk on, to get to a place you must get to—because of who you are, what you have been through, what you are  ghting for and to be—you learn what place really means, better than any master vacationer, visitor, or even lifelong resident, ever could."

A 1938 episode of radio horror much-loved by historians from Lights Out; an artful Johnny Dollar five-parter; the "jumble" noir that is 1951's His Kind of Woman with Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, and Vincent Price; and two all-time great second baseman: one modern, and the other who is the best right handed hitter in baseball history. 

Discussing a couple recent JazzTimes features, the late Paul Soles (the voice of Hermey the Elf in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer), Sam Cooke's 1963 "dark night of the soul" concept album, and 1949's The Set-Up with Robert Ryan, one of our finest sports movies and a tutorial in Aristotle's concept of unity of time, place, action. 

Jazz's greatest bootleg and the guitarist's role in helping to invent bebop after hours at Minton's in NYC. "There’s a somatic quality to that tone, and an annunciatory one, a Klaxon horn of sustained notes spreading from top to bottom in the listener. But the sheen and viscosity is even more notable, as if honey has been drizzled over the inside of an abalone shell."

Weighing in on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the Grateful Dead's "Ripple," the 1958 Boris Karloff film, The Haunted Strangler, and Carlton Fisk's elite performance level as a catcher in his forties.