Tuesday 2/7/23
Radio interview tonight about the in-progress Giving You Everything: A Hard Day's Night and the Artistic Zenith of the Beatles, and also the 585-minute session that produced the Please Please Me LP.
I had a dream the other night that I was in this fantastic store. I bought the complete 1982 Topps baseball card set there for only $32. 1982 Topps cards just look how a baseball card is supposed to look. I bought a CD of a live radio recording of Furtwangler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in a 1957 performance of Beethoven's Fifth. Which doesn't exist. And I bought a record of a live 1938 performance from Jelly Roll Morton that also doesn't exist. And they had a Mosaic box set of Baby Dodds recordings, which, again, doesn't exist. I didn't get that, though, and immediately regretted it.
After a four day hiatus, I worked out again. I can't give up. Did 100 push-ups (starting with a set of fifty, then twenty, then thirty) and ran the short stairs 100 times.
I finished "Banged Up." I probably read it back thirty times.
Why are the Bruins not playing all week? That is very strange.
I watched a short film called Safe from 2021. I thought it was very well done. There were about ten things that stick with you. It's about a father who works in security at a casino. His kid hurt someone at a bar by smashing him with a pint glass. The kid is wanted by the cops, and the father is hiding him out in an empty room at the hotel. The arc of it works. The writing works. It's done the right way, with the right amount included, the right amount not explicitly stated, with what needs to be in there being in there. It's a lot better than any recent film I've seen in quite a while.
A woman my age died in Christopher Columbus Park the other night when it was really cold. She lived in the North End. The news report said she was 500 yards from her apartment. I've been thinking about this. She was out at a bar with her brother, I think, and friends. News stories leave out a lot. She was going to walk, and the others were going to take a cab or some hired car. That's odd. There has to be more to it than that. You wouldn't have let someone in your party walk while you were going to get in a car. In pretty much any weather. Let alone that weather. So what happened? Then what happened in Christopher Columbus Park? My guess is she was so drunk that she fell, or she sat down and fell asleep. When I first read the headline, I thought the report was going to be about a homeless person. But this was a neighbor of mine. Like I said, same age.
The Beanpot has been played for seventy years. There are only four teams in the tournament. And yet for the first time, we'll have a Northeastern-Harvard final. That is a remarkable bit of trivia. How was that possible? I did watch quite a bit of the BC-Northeastern game. BC scored two goals late to tie it up, then lost with less than two seconds to go in OT. I didn't realize that the new Beanpot rule is there's a five minute three-on-three OT, and after that it goes to penalty shots.
I don't like this at all. I can't stand penalty shots. Normally, I stop watching then. I'm not interested. It's not real hockey. Even if it went to penalty shots last night, I probably would have shut it off and checked later to see who won. I can see the NHL getting rid of regular playoff OT as the world becomes ever softer. It's the Beanpot. It's an event. It's cold outside. It's jumping inside. The place is jammed. It has this big hockey sleepover vibe without sleeping over. The student sections going at it, the battle of the pep bands. Let them play the whole thing out. If the second game starts at ten, cool. You can say you had an awesome night at the Garden. An unlikely night. Leave the gimmick OT and shootout for the consolation game on the second Monday, which nobody cares about.
This guy did a must-read blog post about Monica Cannon-Grant, who is facing an eighteen-count Federal indictment. Look at the people in charge at Billerica high school. Look at the incompetence. Look how horny people are to show that they're one of the good ones, that they invite this racist, criminal, illiterate, violent, thieving hate-monster to talk to high school students. You don't even look her up on Google? And you pay her, too? Can you imagine what a shit show that was? Or if you were a kid at that school?
A friend said something to me today about people in publishing, after he tried to read that Salman Rushdie story last night. Obviously that's incredibly bad writing. Obviously Salman Rushdie has no skill as a writer. The whole thing is disgusting. Everything in publishing is always disgusting. That's kind of the big word, right? One of them. But it's a word that people say to me often. Just how disgusting it is.
I've heard more instances of knowing laughter--you know, that kind of laughter that isn't because something's funny--about publishing than anything else combined. If I say to someone like this friend, "Well, so and so has this piece blank in that venue blank, and the editor is their agent's dad," then I hear that laughter, sometimes followed by an "Of course."
I'm going to do another post and we'll get more into just how filthy David Remnick is when it comes to Salman Rushdie. It should be impossible for anyone to take David Remnick seriously. But I'll be thorough. As I said, the word for this year is "systematic."
My friend says to me, "I've been thinking. It's really like all of these people in publishing have the worst dirt on each other. Like they're having sex with children or something. It really is like that. They way they look out for each other, it's like they're scared that other person will spill the truth and out them."
It is like that. I think that's pretty clear. It totally comes off that way.
