Do you want to hold a penis: Previewing the Beatles' Rubber Soul Super Deluxe Edition, Reddit emails, certain gnats, The Golden Girls, commercials, I Bury the Living, Sviatoslav Richter, Les Paul

Thursday 7/30/26

Got some needed sleep. Ready to go hard again. The razor is charging. Haven't shaved in three or four days. About to be remedied.

Sometimes there's a person who would be so easy to blow up, but they're such a nothing, such a failure in whatever they do and as a person, they're just so low, and they have no bearing on you--in terms of, say, blocking your path--and they're more like a gnat that even the other gnats hold lower than the standard gnat, and you also know that they'd love--for that's how sick they are--to be acknowledged by name by the likes of you, even if it's you humiliating them, that you almost can't.

How many people do you think sent me anything with the whole Reddit harpie thing? Take a guess.

That's right: zero. Wholly unsurprising.

Pitched something on the Beatles' upcoming Rubber Soul Super Deluxe Edition. I'll tell you the key tracks on the studio session disc right now:

• The various versions of "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" and "I'm Looking Through You"

• The "Day Tripper" composition tape.

• Lennon's demo of a song called "Little Girl."

Remember (or come to understand): Rubber Soul was perhaps the highlight of John Lennon's career and art. A Hard Day's Night is up there as well. So, the idea of a heretofore unknown song by him from this period is notable.

People will find the "Think for Yourself" studio chat entertaining, but my bet would be that it'll be cut down from what's available on bootleg, but I don't know that, because otherwise you'd have Lennon singing "Do you want to hold a penis," to the tune of "Do You Want to Know a Secret."

The first take of "In My Life"--one of the crown jewels of Beatles outtakes--already came out on the latest pass through the Anthology back in November.

They had to grind it out, but nice win for the Red Sox in Sacramento against the Athletics in extras. Wrapped up around one in the morning here in the East. Entertaining game, with some heady play, like Caleb Durbin tagging up from first on an outfield fly that helped produce a run the Sox had to have. Character player. Possible Gold Glove winner at third this year. Sox can take the series today. Name of the game in baseball: win series. Sonny Gray has struggled in his last two starts--especially his most recent one--and I'm sure he wants to remediate that.

An A's player jacked one in the bottom of the ninth against Chapman, and this guy just stood there loving himself. Ball didn't get out, and instead of being on third, he was on second. Could have been the difference in the game. No one else put the ball in play, but maybe someone would have hit a tapper or something in a different situation and the run would have come in. Bad baseball really stands out.

Downloaded the complete series of The Golden Girls. Tried this one version, didn't like how it looked, thew it away, went with another. A better time. I'm not a man linked to any time, really, within myself. I was never "just" in a given year at any point in my life. I have always gone to what is interesting and substantive. Nostalgia will kill you, as I've written. Those oriented towards nostalgia are already dead. Spiritual rigor mortis.

When I was eight years old, there I was reading books and exploring worlds from centuries before. I'll talk about the day's Red Sox game alongside a reference to something that happened in a game in 1914. But I look at the world when a show like The Golden Girls aired, and I see a much better world. Not because of nostalgia. But because of what I see. For me, it's always been about what I see. What things are.

I'll give you another example. Small, maybe, but not so small. If you listen to vintage radio, as I do, you hear a lot of commercials from the 1940s and 1950s. You know what these commercials aren't? Stupid. Annoying. Some are clever. Some are very funny, like those on Inner Sanctum with Mr. Host and Mary the Lipton tea lady. Most are informative. They'll have a catchy little tune.

You know what commercials now try to do? Annoy the living fuck out of you if you're not a complete idiot. For instance, the Liberty Mutual commercials.

This isn't a coincidence. It's not that the marketers have cracked some commercial code. It's a reflection of us, a world of utter morons. Drooling, babbling idiots who can't focus, who need to have thing loud and repetitive. No variety, no nuance, no wit, just this giant jackhammer approach to it all.

You wouldn't see a show like The Golden Girls now. It's just smart. Which is ironic, because in the past, when it was always on Lifetime and you'd watch, you never really thought of it that way. Almost like it was an indulgence of yours. Not quite junk food, if you will, but you follow me.

But there's hanging out, conversation, back and forth, the relationships are real and matter, there's verbal humor--jokes based on word play, secondary meanings. These people have believable strengths and flaws.

You never, never, never would get this now. It's not in any hyped Netflix or Apple+ show. They're so formulaic and mentally lazy in how they're made. They're not real. They don't have any human realness to them. They're one-note, cliches. They're written to repeat themselves. The characters pause every ten minutes to restate what's happened and where we're at. They're unnatural. It's like the TV version of being in some room where the air is close. There's no breeze. And it's not an interesting room. It's the most generic doctor's office waiting room.

People don't care when people that they don't know die. They care that they can post about it and try and get attention. "I'm literally sobbing my eyes out..." No you're not. They love this. They're actually happy, in this sense, that that person died. People don't feel for others. They have no empathy. To have empathy, you need imagination. Among other things. And people don't. Nor do they have the other things either.

And sympathy and empathy are totally different things, though I very much doubt if you could find two dozen people in the world who could understand this on their own. Or five. Or two.

Finished watching I Bury the Living this morning and can now write about it for the horror film book. One of your better 1950s horror films. It works. This would be a fun one on the big screen or out at a drive-in. Would make a nice double bill with Carnival of Souls.

Downloaded Paul McCartney's gig with Wings from the Hammersmith Odeon on September 17, 1975, as well as Sviatoslav Richter performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 at Symphony Hall with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in early November 1960. Had I existed then, I would have been there.

And also a couple Les Paul and Mary Ford items: a four-disc set called In Perfect Harmony and an expanded version of Christmas Cheer!, an EP from 1954. A nice memory: sitting with Les Paul on a small couch in the small backstage room at Iridium, just the two of us, talking music.

I believe I have a title for the the story I've referenced over the past couple days.