Couple Dark Stars and active listening, Compleat Beatles, Christmas art, some Vaginov, Bear Family boxes, writing, Evelyn Waugh interview, messing with Lucas McCain, out on the PA turnpike, new puppy

Friday 12/5/25

I was looking at these amazing photos of the Grateful Dead playing at the Matrix around this time in 1966. Bobby Weir is playing a Rickenbacker, which is surprising. What stands out most, though, is how small the venue was, with people sitting at tables doing nothing but watching the stage and listening to the music. This is the same spot where you could have seen the Doors and the Velvet Underground. Take a look at these photos of the Dead--they're easily found--and imagine what that must have been like. Sitting there, hands folded on your table, listening to "Sister Ray." It's such a contrast with today. This was active music listening. No phones, obviously, no drunken singing along. Being there to listen. Actively. Not passively.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, in addition to all of the work I did, and the stairs I ran, I spent considerable time with the 1/17/70 version of "Dark Star" from Oregon State. Doing my version of active listening. You can't do anything else while you listen to "Dark Star." You can't miss anything. You must be present the entire time.

Last night I sat down to listen to the opening portion of the 12/6/73 "Dark Star" from Cleveland, which is among the longest of all Dark Stars at forty-four minutes. As long as a symphony. What I wanted to focus on was how they make tuning up a part of the performance. You could say that's not really tuning up, then, which is part of the point. I wrote in the Sam Cooke book that you can already tell how tight the band is going to be before they begin playing. Similar idea here. There's that notion that "Dark Star" doesn't stop or start; it's always going, and one taps into it. Here we have that idea made musically manifest.

There I am, and there I was forty-four minutes later. I couldn't step away. The time passes like the snap of one's fingers. You've been in place, though, for the time it'd take to watch two episodes of a sitcom (once the commercials are excised).

Here's somewhat of an indication of where things are at, via a portion of a letter:

Things get harder and harder. I do nothing, I look at nothing. If I seem rude or disinterested, it's instead that I'm trying to live until tomorrow, and then repeat that if I do. I write, I run stairs. That's all I can do right now. And whatever with these evil people. But just so you know. I don't click on Instagram things. I just try to get to the next day. And create. It's not how I want things to be. Obviously. It's unlivable and scary. 

Anytime I watch The Rifleman and someone says, "You're a coward, Lucas McCain!" or words to those effect--"You're yellow, sod buster!" being another oft-encountered aspersion--I think, "What are you doing here? Are you out of your mind?" And then it plays out like it plays out every time.

Received a note here yesterday from David Silver, who wrote 1982's The Compleat Beatles. He'd read my Rolling Stone piece from some years back. I made sure to let him know how much the writing in that film meant to me. It really did. I carried that writing around in my head, in a way, in terms of how it married sound and sense. I saw that documentary at a formative time. It remains far and away the best Beatles documentary, too. Much better than the Anthology, and better than the Get Back docu-series. I have real respect for it.

The lead guitar playing on Brenda Lee's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" smokes. That's Hank Garland. He played with Elvis Presley from 1958-61, including on the Elvis is Back album and at the Pearl Harbor benefit show in March 1961 which is one of the great gigs of the decade.

Downloaded some Bear Family box sets from the likes of Jean Shepard, Kitty Wells, Johnny Horton, Rod McKuen. Also the Old Time Radio Researchers' complete edition of Dark Fantasy episodes, a Captain Acid remaster of the Rolling Stones in Baton Rouge in 1975, and a bunch of Dylan sets: Captain Acid remasters of Complete Before the Flood, This Wheel's on Fire (Wallingford, CT, 6/27/97), a recording from the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. on 12/5/97, and one from Sacramento on 6/16/99.

Dark Fantasy is akin to Inner Sanctum, in that you don't initially, maybe, look at it as this top tier radio program, but it grows on you such that it can become a favorite and a show you regularly revisit. It didn't run for long--only from November 1941 to June 1942, thirty-one episodes in total.

Among my favorites is "Pennsylvania Turnpike" from March 20, 1942. A good chunk of that episode is the back-and-forth between an elderly man who has been traveling for a long time, and the owner of the shop he walks into one night. This is the kind of store that was many stores in one. You'd get coffee there and a sandwich--and much is made about a cup of coffee and a (ham) sandwich--and shells for your rifle and your clothes and a skillet. This is the early 1940s, but we have the strong sense that the store is a holdover from an era that is over, but signs of which still remain.

And I love how they let this back-and-forth play out. There's no rush. Orson Welles said that the best parts of his films were the parts that, from the viewpoint of another producer, didn't need to be there. He didn't mean they were extraneous. But they weren't the parts that a guidebook, as such, in making these things, would advise you to do. He wasn't going by the book. No worthwhile does. It follows from its own book, so to speak. And works within the context of itself. People want to read these self help type of writing books.

Well, it doesn't work that way. Usually, that's just someone faking something in regards to this thing they're not very good at as a way to try and cash in. They're limited in what they know and can do, but they can do--fake--this thing well enough, and there are plenty of people who want to be deceived by people who are as mediocre as they are. In terms of doing this thing in question, I mean. I could listen to the byplay of these two men in this store time and again. I have. Something more sinister is going on, but you wouldn't know it. You'd think this was small talk--albeit querulous (on the older man's part) and incredulous (on the store owner's) small talk--but something more sinister is afoot. But we still enjoy the talk.

Also downloaded two slightly different sets of Watching Rainbows: The Ultimate Get Back Sessions Remaster. Someone did yeoman's work here. They didn't think that the vaunted, and also somewhat infamous, given the task it set out for itself, A/B Road set from Purple Chick was all it quite could be. So, they began what must have been the arduous undertaking of filling in gaps, making available the material that hadn't yet been collected, and putting all of it in the correct order. That's a big-time undertaking.

One of the few bright spots about the internet at this juncture are things of this nature. These acts of a kind of musical service. That's why I mention someone like a Captain Acid. Sweat, time, energy, patience, expertise--you have some dedicated people marshaling those qualities to produce these sets--people who do detective work--that would have been all but impossible to do, say, twenty years ago. Ten years ago.

I watched this interview with Evelyn Waugh from 1962 on a program on the BBC called Face to Face in 1962. What you'll read about the interview will tell you that it was combustible, that Waugh was prickly, even splenetic, but that wasn't really the case if you actually watch/listen to it. The questions are fair and so are Waugh's answers.

What stood out to me was the money issue. The class issue. This is someone who was born into money and privilege. He talks about living in the country, not because he loves nature, but because he wants to be away from people. The interviewer asks him if he has staff--servants--and Waugh is almost taken aback that such a thing was queried at all, because of course he does.

I don't know how much in the actual world someone like Waugh ever was. He had a tough time at a prep school before moving to another. But beyond that, I tend to doubt it. Either as a child or an adult. I'm not suggesting you have to live in a garret to create great work. Or that doing so facilitates the creation of great work. You do, though, have to live in the world. Know the world. I think Waugh knew a great deal of insularity.

I went back into "Love, Your Mouse," thinking perhaps that I'd find it done, but it wasn't. I made multiple alterations. We'll see how it next looks.

Most days I've been working on "Dead Thomas," and it's not lost on me the timing of my doing so, as it's so hard for me to live to the next day. Perhaps it's fitting. From a part I've been working on this morning:

During lunch Thomas sat alone at a table with his palms facing the ceiling but as though the ceiling wasn’t there and instead the vast, endless sky of night, a sky that causes you to feel like you need to pick out the right star for the most important wish of your life that you haven’t made yet because you’ve been protecting it from not coming true.  

He may have been making an appeal to someone or something or trying to be beamed up, I honestly didn’t know, but that’s how he struck me. There were no windows in the cafeteria and I had doubts that the sun was still out at all.

“Should we go over and talk to him?” Rachel asked me, as she folded an empty sandwich bag into smaller and smaller squares than you’d think was possible, something she did when she was nervous. It looked like a pill a pharmacist had decided shouldn’t be round or a window for a fairy.

“He seems busy,” I said. “I think he just wants to die. Finish the process.”

“You have to complete it?”

“Sure.”

“I didn’t know it worked like that.”

“I don’t think it normally does. In rare cases.”

I considered saying something about how at least Ms. Kathleen hadn’t made a joke about being a doubting Thomas, which was a staple of hers, but Rachel wouldn’t have heard me anyway because she’d already risen and was walking over to Thomas’s table and it wasn’t like I could leave her alone with a dead boy, so I got up and went, too.

Rewatched 1980's Christmas Evil, then began a piece about it, which I'll hopefully finish this morning and send off. I have five Christmas horror film pieces to write, a spate of op-eds, I want to do a Christmas work of fiction--which I did more head work on last night in bed--and I have music pieces to write. First op-ed order of business is about the 1985 Chicago Bears. Likely won't be able to do anything with it but I should write it and see. It's just work. A decision to do that work. What else would I be doing? It's all I do anyway.

Also watched the 1945 Czech stop motion film, A Christmas Dream, which I'll be writing about today or tomorrow. And also the first season of the show Black Doves, which I won't be writing about. I thought it'd make for apt Christmas viewing fare. And it did. Wasn't great, but had some wry lines. Christmas--the settings like the library at night, and the church at evensong--is a big part of the show. I think it'd have worked less well if it was, say, May instead. To me, it had to be Christmas.

New York Review of Books sent me a copy of Konstantin Vaginov's Goat Song. I began reading Vaginov a couple years out of college. Was hard to come by anything, so it's nice to see a widely available title by him. Then later I wrote that piece for The Nation about Vaginov and his fellow writers of OBERIU. In the time since, I've probably read Daniil Kharms the most. His name came up in something I published recently...trying to recall what it was.

Ah, yes, I remember--it was a feature on Bobby "Boris" Pickett's The Original Monster Mash LP, which I wrote also planning to include it in my book discussing various horror works of television, literature, painting, radio, film, and music. Earlier this year I found a new translation of Alexander Vvedensky's Christmas at the Ivanovs', which I'll reread in the lead-up to Christmas day. The play features the spot-on line: "Everybody lies, everybody dies." How many of us lie to ourselves more than we lie to anyone else? How many lie exclusively--or nearly--to themselves? I have a couple Christmas crime/mystery novels I'd like to get to first, starting with Rupert Latimer's Murder After Christmas.

Haven't been doing a great job on the stairs. I missed yesterday entirely. Aiming, though, to have a productive session of stair running inside the Bunker Hill Monument today. There's so much to do. I need to find a rhythm.

I've let this go too longer documentation-wise, so rather than let that continue any longer, I'll quickly add that this past Sunday marked 3423 days, or 489 weeks, without a drink. I think 500 weeks would be a nice little achievement, and I'll do my best to try and get there.

Remember: Never assume the day. With anything. Go out and earn the day.

My sister's family got a dog! His name is Cody. They had another dog named Max who died a few years ago. My buddy, Amelia, is struggling a little bit with how much attention Cody is getting. She's used to...well, I guess you could say commandeering attention. I'm sure everyone will settle in soon, though. Sounds like Cody will be a great addition to the family. I'm happy for them.

Edit: The 1985 Bears op-ed has now been written. Doing all of this while dealing with that insane childish nonsense from earlier. This sociopathic coward actually got the comment erased. Can you imagine being that willingly pathetic? How would you live with yourself? It's obviously Matt Hanson. Couldn't even deny it. What an absolute nut job. Really makes Erica Levi Zelinger at The Smart Set look pretty sane and non-evil, huh? Although I have to say it amuses me that in that photo Matt Hanson appears to be ogling his own man boobs. Beatles writings section of site has also been updated. There are a bunch of Beatles-related op-eds in the op-ed section rather than the Beatles section, and many Beatles-related interviews in the On-air section, both of which are up to date as well, unlike most everything else on the site. Pitched something on Judy Garland, too. And that's the morning. What fun. Stairs next.