Art range: Jeeves and Wooster, new story, Grateful Dead's 8/18/70 show, Pasolini letters, Zepp's first "Stairway," Bagpuss/Paddington, John Singer Sargent, '67 telecast, Live at Leeds issue sorted

Wednesday 3/18/26

I spent the other night in the company of Bertram and Wooster. Wodehouse is skilled at what he does. My issue with it, as such, is that it only goes so far. His writing is entertaining, but I wouldn't call it great art. I think of it like the comedic analogue to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mystery stories.

There are parameters in place. Art, in my view, must put you position to experience and feel like you are witnessing what I look at as the answers to it all and to reveal the quintessence of humanness to humans. Don't get me wrong--I read Wodehouse often. I also listen to the BBC radio recordings with my man James Hordern often, too. But he's circumscribed. Maybe intentionally circumscribed, but circumscribed nonetheless.

Wodehouse's comedy hasn't dated, though I wonder two things: One, who could understand it today in our illiterate society in which nuance and subtlety are almost completely lost on everyone, or misinterpreted; and two, how it becomes harder to enjoy these stories on account of the blithe life of leisure, free of any struggle, that Bertram lives.

These are tales of the sheltered and privileged. People who don't earn. They're just given. Born into a life as a lucky sperm. Jeeves works, yes, but you're always seeing the stories through the eyes and life of Bertram. They're stories of class, like the current publishing industry is all about class, save that the people in the Wodehouse stories aren't inbred cowardly vipers whose scales are a kind of sinecure-wide coat of arms of envy and discrimination.

Same night I was also reading a collection of Pier Paolo Pasolini's letters. I've been returning to his The Gospel According to St. Matthew of late and will keep doing so. This was the same night that Jayson Tatum returned to the Celtics' line-up and I was watching that as well.

The next morning I arose and began work on a new story called, "Open or Closed." I also spent time with the audience recording of the Grateful Dead's 8/18/70 performance at the Fillmore West which is one of the best things I've ever heard and is a contender for the most historically significant musical recording ever made in this country.

It was at this show that the Dead premiered a number of songs that would gain official release in November on American Beauty, which in my view is the finest American record ever made. I don't think you beat those songs. The Beatles never wrote anything better. Dylan never wrote anything better. Nor the Gershwins. Duke Ellington. Irving Berlin. Schubert's lieder aren't at the same level. I believe that as songs, "Truckin'," "Box of Rain," and "Ripple" are the best songs ever written, and the first and third of those numbers were premiered at this show, "Truckin'" acoustically, no less.

And "Brokedown Palace." To hear this version of "Brokedown Palace" is to hear the weight of sound. How it presses down upon you--the sound of that. And at the same time, there is the energy of the thing. What is the maxim we return to? The value of a work of art is directly proportional to the amount of life it contains.

Find me a better line, by the way, than "I guess they can't revoke your soul for trying."

To sit before the dawn and listen to the first ever performance of "Ripple" is to do right by your soul. Sound-wise, it's a solid audience tape. It's not for official release. It's meant to be for you, the person who knows about it. For you to take it into the world, rather than for it to be on a streaming service out in the world.

In that sense, it sounds like it should sound. There's the quality of a musical version of a Frederic Remington painting, or maybe I should say a Remington study/sketch for a painting. Or a rustic underpainting beckoning one to a layer beneath that of the surface. The beauty is almost too much, like I cannot bear it.

I downloaded upgraded versions of the complete series of Bagpuss and Paddington (Michael Hordern strikes again!). So rich in wonder and whimsy. I don't think of them as two of the best children's series but rather two of the best series. They don't seem more suited for children than they do to adults in my estimation unless you as the latter has lost and/or failed to develop something that is integral to being truly alive. But that would be a you thing, as they say.

Downloaded a copy of Led Zeppelin's Ulster Hall gig in Belfast from March 5, 1971, which featured the first performances of "Black Dog," "Going to California," "Rock and Roll," and "Stairway to Heaven." Kind of speaks for itself. Audience source.

My issue regarding the original, undoctored, "pure" version of the Who's Live at Leeds has been resolved. As one might recall, I reached out to my buddy Howard, the King of the Find, the man who can lay hands on just about any recording--often within minutes--about locating a digital copy of the album, one of the greatest albums of any kind, which is somehow out-of-print, a truth that is, I feel, unknown to everyone save maybe a couple dozen people in the world, if that. Which is depressing--people are lousy at listening, and they don't notice much. Like everything, listening is a go-through-the-motions-I-don't-need-to-be-present thing.

More on this later, but I am convinced that if I alone possessed an album that the Beatles recorded between Sgt. Pepper and the White Album, which they hid in a bunker until someone presented it to me, and I played that album for people who consider themselves massive Beatles fans, who post constantly about the Beatles, that those people wouldn't even be able to tell this was the Beatles.

People can't tell. They need to be told or have to understand what they're supposed to think going in, and then they "listen" in accordance with that, which is to say, not truly listen at all. They don't know. We don't live in a such a way, we aren't such a way, that allows us to know. We're not knowing beings.

I was working as usual, when I tried a different combination of words regarding digital files of the original Live at Leeds--I'll do that, in the off-chance I get lucky--and up came a page on a site I'd never been to before. I checked it out, and what do you know, there were links that still worked from like a dozen years ago. Problem solved. Sent the fellow whose site it is this note after:

Hey, man,

How's it going? Came across your wonderful site this morning, and wanted to thank you for making the original version of the Who's Live at Leeds available. I searched for a digital copy of the original album for an age. I have a copy of the CD from 1990 somewhere, but I can't access it.

It's funny: in describing the original LP to people and how it no longer (for shame!) exists, basically--at least in terms of the streaming services--I've gotten one incredulous response after another. I then try and explain the matters of the different mixes, the removal of the tape hiss and what not, and the excising of Roger Daltrey's scream near the start of "My Generation," and people act as though I've invented these thing or am this big practical joker when it comes to live rock albums. 

There are two ways to listen to the thing that was the Who at Leeds in my view: either in the form of the original album, or the entire bootleg, best experienced in the Captain Acid remaster. They're very different experiences, a dichotomy I find fascinating. I'm also writing a book about Live at Leeds, so finding a handy copy today was extra-valuable for me. 

Love the rest of your site, too, and thanks again. It's a real service!

Also sent the link to Howard in case he was interested (he's not a huge Who guy, though) and someone else on Instagram who once had the early CD that contained this original version and to his regret had parted with it.

Been watching the earliest surviving broadcast of a complete baseball game in color, that being the Red Sox against the Twins from September 30, 1967. A huge game from a huge season for the Impossible Dream hometown team led by Carl Yastrzemski, whom I'd argue had the most valuable season that an MVP has ever had in the history of baseball. No one has been more valuable to a team than Yaz was to those Red Sox.

This is an entry about art, and there's an art to baseball, which one is privy to with this broadcast. It was such a different game. An organic game. A game of flow. I've written in the recent past in the New York Daily News about how there's a rhythm to baseball when baseball is most emblematically baseball, and you see that here. You rarely see it now.

We're given a glimpse world in which there was perspective, something that's no longer much of a thing, in that we don't have perspective. We're not accurate assessors of value. The very concept of which becomes obsolete in a world where it's about who is the loudest and there are no human voices becomes there's just this din in which you can't separate anything from anything else, as it's all the same. People are the same. They talk the same way in the same three dozen, ready made phrases. Individuality doesn't exist. It's just one big, ugly, unthinking mass.

I watch this game and I see a baseball game, which is a deceptively simple statement--or is that deceptively complex? It is no more and no less than what it is. It's not a surface for projection. It's untrammeled by agenda. The parasocial isn't at play. The players aren't treated like cuddly stuffed animals for empty, broken people to talk about as though they were close friends in their lives in a world where people no longer have friends because no one is capable of being a friend, which I've also written about recently in an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune.

I see baseball played as it ought to be played. A game that is better understood as both a game and the game's place in the world, and one's place in relation to that game and within the world. A day at the ballpark. Let it be what it is. Higher stakes than usual for both of those teams, sure, but it's a game one can't help but watch and understand. Well, we can find ways so that we're incapable of understanding anything, no matter how simple it ought to be. But this is a game that should be harder for it to be lost on you as what it is and why that's good and better.

Went to the Museum of Fine Arts. Spent most of my time there with the paintings of John Singer Sargent. The MFA has always been a great place for Sargent's work. There was the exhibit of his watercolors that I wrote about for The New Criterion. The paintings on display on the second floor of the American Wing represent cornerstone Sargent stuff, unlike, say, what you'll get at the Public Library on Boylston Street. Murals weren't Sargent's forte.

It's entrancing how he uses whites. No one paints with that color like Sargent does. Close to the canvas, you're like, "What?" Then you take the right amount of steps back and the white folds we'll see of a garment in the painting look more like a garment than a garment itself does, if that makes sense, without crossing the line into the realm of the hyperreal.

I took a photo of Sargent's Helen Sears, which he completed in 1895, his portrait of a six-year-old, and sent it to my sister to share with this six-year-old we both know. My sister texted back saying she wondered if Amelia would think it was the Little Ghost Girl, and I clarified that it wasn't, but that the ghost of the painter who did the portrait was a guest speaker at the LGG's school.