Saturday 1/12/19
• Yes, we get it, Cris Collinsworth, you like Patrick Mahomes. All clear.
• Jack Edwards says some weird things. During his intro for the Bruins game tonight, he remarked that the Maple Leafs would be like Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, if they were a movie, thus referencing the 1969 film; and the Bruins would be like Rocky. What on earth does this mean? You can tell that Andy Brickley knows this is coming ahead of time, because you can see his smile kind of brace for it when Edwards gets started.
• Pitched ideas on the dance Laurel and Hardy do in Way Out West and the last song Billie Holiday ever recorded
• Made more extensive notes to do some of the things I really do not wish to do, but which I have to do as part of the cause. The confluence of causes. Remember, after, when your life is a shambles and you are a laughingstock: You brought us here. You forced my hand. I tried everything I could to work with you, for years in every case, and you were that committed to the grudge and bigotry and unprofessionalism and incompetence and envy. All you had to do was do your job, or a tiny bit of it.
• I thought The Sopranos was a pointless, awful show, that helped usher in an era of other pointless, awful shows. The Sopranos--and I knew it was ridiculous right from its daft, over-the-top name (complete with the laughable symbolism of "they've had their balls cut off!")--features not a single likable character. Everyone in it is base, evil, simple. Cartoonish. Artists paint with brushes, clods with rollers. (We are talking within the artistic medium. Not, you know, when you are painting a room. Roll away, there.) The reason for its success was that it was a show that presented a group that you were not part of, and, as we became more a society of nullity and disconnection, in part because of the internet, it was a way for people to live vicariously, to feel part of a group that they were not a part. Shows like this are exclusionary, they glorify something you are not a part of but wish to be, preying on your emptiness. Not inclusionary. "You are not part of this group, but wouldn't you like to be?" Been planning to write something about this. When I say pointless and awful, I don't mean, of course, like something written by Blake Butler or Mark Doten. You can actually get through The Sopranos. But this greatest modern art bollocks--please. If this is the competition, when I get on a level playing field it will be like Gretzky taking on squirts.
• Finished reading Hugh Walpole's The Killer and the Slain. He's good at the line-level, but this book, so dependent on its central idea--two guys are closely linked, weaker guy kills the bullying guy, then takes on his personality--just does not work. Like a lame Jekyll and Hyde thing. Which was a shame. Walpole had skill.
• It's too easy to play quarterback in the NFL right now.
• Having said that, Andrew Luck is one dog of a competitor. Toenail clippings have more fight in them than he does.
• I listened to Art Tatum's group session with Jo Jones and Red Callender today. Cooks.
• Listened to Buddy Holly. So progressive.
• Listened to the Hollies' BBC sessions. Manchester is the real capital of great rock. It's not Memphis, Liverpool, Detroit, LA, Chicago, NYC, London, San Francisco. It's Manchester.
• Listened to Miles Davis at the Cellar Door in 1970. What a band.
• And also this: Oasis at Wembley in 2000. This is the gig they did not commercially release. At the beginning of this last number, Noel Gallagher introduces it as "Rock 'n' Roll Star." Following which, Liam Gallagher decides to introduce it himself, prompting his brother to say, "I just said that." Listen to what Liam says after that. That, friends, is the difference between everything pointless and disposable in this life, and everything vital and true. The cause.
• This is the dance. Rarely in cinema do we see two friends dance. It is, for me, one of the purest moments of unadulterated joy in cinema, achieved by two non-dancers, who rarely ever tried to dance at all in their work. Note the economy of the dance. A foot flick. An ever-so-light leg shimmy.