Dying is a wild Night and a new Road: thoughts on music, film, TV, literature with an emphasis on autumn

Tuesday 10/13/26

Dark times call for art, which is light. Of course, such darkness seeks to oppose light. It isn't like the darkness of the night, which has no agency in not giving way to the light of morning.

One always ought to listen to more Otis Redding. It's just good for you. Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul is for contemplating; a night of mulling and being real with one's self. Live in Europe is for making the blood flow and bolstering one's will and spirit and is itself inspirited in the manner of only a few of the best live recordings. Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 for instance.

What I wouldn’t do to have live albums by Little Willie John and the 5 Royales. Also, the Count Five circa 1966.

"So alone I keep the wolves at bay." That is a hell of a line. The Clash's "Train in Vain."

Perhaps the most autumnal band: the Byrds. Their records have that melodic melancholia of fall. A sound of wisdom that's endemic to autumn, a season of greater realization for one suitably equipped. "Oh, what would you give me?/Say the sad bells of Rhymney" as sung by Roger McGuinn. Turn! Turn! Turn! is the most fall-sounding American LP ever made. If leaves about to separate and descend from the branch had a popular music counterpart, it's this. Turn! Turn! Turn! is a serious masterpiece. I need to write a piece about it in the next few days for someone. It was also one of the first five CDs I ever owned. I'll make them the subject of a different entry. Those exclamation points in the record's title are the most plaintive exclamation points in popular music history.

Sherlock Holmes really behaves in an undignified way in “A Scandal in Bohemia”—it ought to be beneath him. Apart from that, it’s one of the weaker early tales. It would be followed by “The Red-Headed League” the next month (August 1891), which is instead an early triumph.

Contender for the most autumnal Holmes tale: "The Five Orange Pips." That evening all snug from the storm in Baker Street with Holmes and Watson's newly arrived friend having entered his last hour on earth. It's a chilling thing to think about--how much happens in that short amount of time, whatever that short amount of time exactly is.

Rip-roarin’ horror fun: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, published in 1796 when the author was twenty. Incest, sexual pining for the Virgin Mary, the devil; it’s a pot-stirrer. Lewis himself heavily censored a later edition (future suggestive shades of Gogol, shoveling pages of Dead Souls Part 2 into the fire), the novel having brought shame on his family. No need, sir! Stay on that right literary path! Thankfully, the versions one finds today contain the original text.

The Three Investigators in The Mystery of the Sinister Scarecrow: now that hits the seasonal spot. I’ve loved and revisited these books since first discovering them in fourth grade. For all the “deep” art stuff I always have one of these going. They have an important place.

Another recommendation: James Malcolm Rymer's Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood, serialized over two years and then published in (massive) book form in 1847. Frequently billed as a "penny dreadful"--largely because so few in the time since have actually read the thing--the book is among my favorite vampire-related writings, up there with Bram Stoker's Dracula, M.R. James's "Count Magnus," and E.F. Benson's "Mrs. Amworth." Far better than its (unexamined) reputation attests.

A third for this time of year: Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories from 1983. Dahl read 750 stories (or said he did) in order to compile this anthology, though the fourteen selections are standard to the aficionado. Still, you get two stories by A.M. Burrage, whose work is hard to come by, and two from Rosemary Timperley, who is forgotten these days and shouldn't be. Plus, Richard Middleton, L.P. Hartley, and Francis Marion Crawford's "The Upper Berth," one of the best ghost stories set at sea.

I'm going to mention this one again: Middleton's "The Ghost Ship" (1912). It's one of my favorite things ever written. A hilarious, witty, wise work from a man who suffered from severe depression and had taken his own life at Christmastime the year before, aged twenty-nine. A ship captained and crewed by ghosts goes off course and gets stuck in a turnip field of an English village. The ghosts and the people have to live together, as such, for a spell. Pure reading delight.

I read Robert Hichens' story "How Love Came to Professor Guildea" the other day by the water after running stairs in the Monument. It was first published in October 1897 and is set in autumn. This is a strong piece of writing by someone who really knew what he was doing. You'd never see writing this capable now. It isn't just the language. It's the knowledge about people. Human nature. There is no writer in today's world who could bring off anything like that relationship between Guildea and Father Murchison. Here we have one of those ghost stories that may not be a ghost story at all like W.F. Harvey's "August Heat" and Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," but it's a major ghost story. Completely original.

Listened to the 2/28/48 Escape production of the story. Escape was such a solid and solidly literate show. The script for this adaptation suggested Orson Welles to me. He had a gift for cutting down a literary text and making it work for the radio. The alterations suited the medium, making for a strong episode of Escape. The story itself is long-ish, and you only have the twenty-eight odd minutes on the air. Stellar cast: Parley Baer, Harry Bartell, and Paul Frees (as Napoleon, the parrot!). Hichens does a fine job writing about the parrot in the original work, and he had to, or else the story wouldn't come off as it does.

One of the great protest songs--or should I say social commentary songs: the Kinks' "Shangri-La." Nails the emptiness of many--most--lives, though this empty version of life at least has more creature comforts than is typical/realistically attainable now. The nice house in the suburbs, etc. Still, empty is empty, isn't it? "Shangri-La" is also quite possibly the only single in rock history to feature the verb "conditioned." I can't think of another, anyway.

October 1957: horror cinema and pop culture history was made in the United States. That's when the "Shock Theater" package of fifty-two pre-1948 horror films was released for television syndication. That meant you had a much better chance of seeing the likes of 1931's Dracula and Frankenstein, 1941's The Wolf Man, 1934's The Black Cat, etc., outside of a revival. You caught The Raven (1935) on the late show and came to know the monsters like never before. They'd gotten in.

Still going to bed each night listening to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater. Will probably continue to do so for a while. E.G. Marshall is an outstanding host. It's like being with a friend in a comfortable spot. Like by a fireside. During fall or at. Christmas. He has a big part to play, too. These episodes have three acts and Marshall speaks to you between them as well as, of course, at the start of the episode and at the end.

His words have wisdom. It's almost shocking how much wisdom is exposed to between these acts. I say shocking especially so because of what's out there now. You never even get a sliver of wisdom in today's world. It's just get stupidity and lowest common denominator in the form of endless repetition with everyone using the same language. For those who don't know him, he's Juror 4 (with the glasses) in 1957's 12 Angry Men. What a voice he had for this host role on CBSRMT. Ideally tailored. As, say, Fred Cusick was to calling hockey games, E.G. Marshall was to hosting CBSRMT. Both were a treat to listen to. And are, because you can listen to them now.

There's little wonder that people were once much smarter--and not that long ago--than they are currently. Yes, the internet, phones, AI. But it's also because of entertainment and art. What you partake of then versus now. This is a huge factor and I'm not sure anyone else out there understands this, let alone is seriously trying to do anything about it.

Watched Curtis Harrington's 1942 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." Harrington made this when he was fourteen. The short is quite interesting in and of itself, but also because it's almost inconceivable that a teenage boy would choose to partake of literature never mind do something like this in today's world. How many adults could even read and understand "Usher" in 2026?

I did finish watching the fourth season of From. As the series go along, and there are fewer and fewer night scenes. But, from a decorative sort of standpoint, and my own predilections, I liked the fall look of this season. I'm not suggesting it had dramatic payoff. I simply mean, all things being equal, I like seeing trees with less leaves on them and leaves on the ground. Branches becoming bare but not fully bare yet. I like bare branches, too, don't get me wrong. But these things are rather different.

Horror films in which the characters watch horror films. Halloween (1978) is a perfect example with The Thing from Another World (1951) which itself is a perfect Halloween film. The opening titles of the Hawks picture just scream out, “Watch me while eating candy in the dark!” don’t they?

Even people who haven't seen the classic first wave films of American horror know them indirectly because of the pop culture iconography they spawned: Dracula (as represented by Bela Lugosi), Frankenstein (as per the Karloff/Pierce monster), the Wolf Man. But oft-overlooked is 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It's a classy, stylish affair. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian and shot by Karl Strauss, who also lensed Murnau's Sunrise, one of cinema's masterpieces. Check out Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde this spooky season. And the Robert Louis Stevenson novel--which is surprisingly short.

October 2, 1959: the first episode of The Twilight Zone, "Where Is Everybody?" airs on CBS. There were TV forerunners to "the Zone"--Tales of Tomorrow, One Step Beyond--but they were almost akin to demo versions, and here was the fully worked up sci-fi/horror track. Imagine what it was like to sit at home on an early autumn night and have the likes of this make its initial appearance on your small, almost certainly black-and-white, TV set.

Bob Dylan slammin' away in Chicago on October 25, 1998. Listen to that tape. Is this the Windy City in the late 1990s or the Manchester Free Trade Hall in late spring 1966? The man is going off. People tend to overlook just how hard Dylan can rock. Dylan, like Miles Davis, is one of the greatest band assemblers/leaders. He knew and knows how to put the guys together. Dylan's singing on "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" should be studied. He doesn't so much as phrase as he text paints. There's something Handel-ian to Dylan's singing. How well is that band playing, too? They get molten on the electric material ("Silvio," "Highway 61 Revisited") and tear it up a whole different other way on the acoustic. Find the Bennyboy remaster.

Charm is a rare quality in writing. Few authors have ever been able to bring it off. F. Scott Fitzgerald could. Emily Dickinson's poem "Autumn" is certainly charming. To wit:

The morns are meeker than they were,

The nuts are getting brown;

The berry's cheek is plumper,

The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,

The field a scarlet gown.

Lest I should be old-fashioned,

I'll put a trinket on.

The line about the rose. Do you understand how that is something AI could never do?

From Dickinson's October 1869 letter to Perez Cowan:

It grieves me that you speak of Death with so much expectation. I know there is no pang like that for those we love, nor any leisure like the one they leave so closed behind them, but Dying is a wild Night and a new Road.

I suppose we are all thinking of Immortality, at times so stimulated that we cannot sleep. Secrets are interesting, but they are also solemn - and speculate with all our might, we cannot ascertain.

Is there a more autumnal opening sequence/theme in television history than that of Newhart? Yes, the footage comes from 1981's On Golden Pond and features what may technically be summer scenes, but the fading light of those New England locales and that kind of upbeat, wistful melancholia of the Henry Mancini theme is unadulterated fall. That whole first season--the show essentially became a different show after--has the quintessential feel of the season. Newhart premiered on October 25, 1982, which was also the twenty-year anniversary of the Beatles' first BBC session with Ringo Starr in the drummer's chair.

From Henry David Thoreau's journal, September 9, 1854:

If the drought has been uncommonly severe, as this year, I should think it would so far destroy the vitality of the leaf that it would attain only to a dull dead color in autumn–that to produce a brilliant autumn the plant should be full of sap & vigor to the last.

Be full of sap and vigor.

From the same on September 22, 1852:

In love we impart each to each, in subtlest, immaterial form of thought or atmosphere, the best of ourselves, such as commonly vanishes or evaporates in aspirations, and mutually enrich each other. The lover alone perceives and dwells in a certain human fragrance. To him humanity is not only a flavor, but an aroma and a flavor also.

Thoreau writing in Walden: "The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer."

John Clare (1793-1864) wrote a number of poems he titled "Autumn." This is from one of them:

While painted woods around my rambles be

In draperies worthy of eternity.

Yet will the leaves soon patter on the ground,

And death's deaf voice awake at every sound:

One drops—then others—and the last that fell

Rings for those left behind their passing bell.

Thus memory every where her tidings brings

How sad death robs us of life's dearest things.

He knew life.

From John Keats' last surviving letter, to his friend Charles Brown, November 30, 1820: "Yet I ride the little horse, and at my worst even in quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life."

Such a beautiful man who gave so much. Ride the little horse.