Best music in 2026, Thoreau goes to a party, something about the Kinks, Beatles back a waiter, John Alton elevating, lit bros lit bro-ing

Saturday 11/14/26

Is this worth reading, is this worth listening to, is this worth seeing.

People are so incurious and intellectually lazy that they need to solicit others who are likely the same to tell them what to do. Find out for yourself. Think for yourself. Read for yourself. Listen for yourself. Watch for yourself. Be yourself.

The Reddit habitué lit bros who call Thomas Pynchon "Pynch." Good Christ.

The Clash's "Train in Vain" is a song about needing closure, seeking closure, and ultimately realizing that closure will never come, with this having to serve as its own form of closure. One of our wisest songs.

You know Rear Window, but do you know Witness to Murder? Same premise--protagonist sees (or thinks they see) a murder from their window--and then plays sleuth, with the release of Witness to Murder predating that of Rear Window by a few months in 1954. (It almost functions as a B picture to the loftier film.) George Sanders (perfect English diction and all) plays an "ex-Nazi," which is treated as casually as if he were an ex-Red Sox (though there's always a point in these things, whether that's here, with Orson Welles in The Stranger, Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, or Elon Musk on a podium, where the Nazi is overcome by his thralldom to Nazism and goes berserk via salute and/or Germanic chanting). Barbara Stanwyck has the Jimmy Stewart role. Most notable is the cinematography by John Alton. Alton's camera work could serve as the star of a picture. And when the movie was weak, it lifted everything else up, like Tom Brady did with his receiving corps in 2006.

Watched the mini-series Chernobyl (2019) made me think about the role of what I'll call personal propaganda plays today in how people try and portray their lives to others--and, by extension, to themselves--which is usually far from the truth and what that means for them and the world. "When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."

That’s double-tracked hiss at the start of Oasis’ “Cigarettes and Alcohol.”

The early Kinks would have these numbers that were kind of twee, but you could tell they were progressing towards increasingly heartfelt and probing work. Songs like "You Do Something to Me" from their debut LP, Kinks, and "Something Better Beginning" from its follow-up, Kinda Kinks, are what I think of as their "Something" songs, portending the deeper something of Something Else a few years later. Something Else was definitely something else, but we can also see where something began.

The Beatles were so tight in Hamburg circa Christmastime 1962 that they made the Star Club waiter sound good singing Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-a-Lula."

Listened to a bolstered version of the Beatles' final concert at San Francisco's Candlestick Park, retitled A Candle Burns, from August 29, 1966. You don't need to make allowances for them as was often the case on the 1966 tour. They sound pretty good and definitely like they're trying a bit more, probably for themselves, knowing what they knew that this was going to be it.

Downloaded the extant episodes of The Black Mass, a strange radio program from the 1960s, which I once published an essay about that will be in a book of rangy horror writings. The program was the brain child of Erik Bauersfeld, later the voice of Admiral Ackbar in Return of the Jedi. Very literary leaning--adaptations of Bierce, Melville, Lovecraft, Stoker, Kafka, Poe. On 10/31/64, Bauersfeld performed a version of M.R. James's "An Evening's Entertainment" that's ideal for a cold autumn night.

Listening to Bob Dylan's 11/12 show from Vienna this morning. The aching beauty of his vocal on "High Water (For Charley Patton)"--he's out there completely exposed and going for it unabashed--against that equally gorgeous back-texture of filigreed guitar lines, then the segue into the rollicking, cocky--but in the good way--cover of Bo Diddley's "I Can Tell." The best music in 2026 is being made by an eighty-five-year-old. Maybe stop saying you're "so old." And this band--damn.

From Thoreau's journal on November 14, 1851, a day on which he went to a party and definitely didn't have a good time:

I could imagine better places for conversation, where there should be a certain degree

of silence surrounding you, and less than forty talking at once. Why, this afternoon, even, I did better. There was old Mr. Joseph Hosmer and I ate our luncheon of cracker and cheese together in the woods . I heard all he said, though it was not much, to be sure, and he could hear me. And then he talked out of such a glorious repose, taking a leisurely bite at the cracker and cheese between his words ; and so some of him was communicated to me, and some of me to him, I trust.

These parties, I think, are a part of the machinery of modern society, that young people may be brought together to form marriage connections.

What is the use of going to see people whom yet you never see, and who never see you? I begin to suspect that it is not necessary that we should see one another.

Some of my friends make singular blunders. They go out of their way to talk with certain young women of whom they think, or have heard, that they are pretty, and take pains to introduce me to them. That may be a reason why they should look at them, but it is not a reason why they should talk with them. I confess that I am lacking a sense, perchance, in this respect, and I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman half an hour simply because she has regular features. The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever tried. They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure whether they are there or not there. I prefer to talk with the more staid and settled, settled for life, in every sense.

I met a man yesterday afternoon in the road who behaved as if he was deaf, and I talked with him in the cold in a loud tone for fifteen minutes, but that uncertainty about his ears, and the necessity I felt to talk loudly, took off the fine edge of what I had to say and prevented my saying anything satisfactory. It is bad enough when your neighbor does not understand you, but if there is any uncertainty as to whether he hears you, so that you are obliged to become your own auditor, you are so much the poorer speaker, and so there is a double failure.

Before you try and do it, don't! I know what a certain kind of person wants to do!

THOREAU IS A MISOGYNST! GET HIM!!!!

Nope. Thoreau didn't care what you were if you had something of substance to ponder, say, offer. These people in this particular account of his--the men and the women--just happened to be the people in front of him on that day. (Nor would Thoreau care if you tried to get him.) Thoreau didn't do preferential treatment, and neither should you, including with yourself.