Tuesday 1/18/22
Here's today's Downtown segment. A lot of avant-garde art. Man Ray, Joseph Cornell, Kafka, Hulme, Coltrane. Where does one encounter that on the radio? And even if one did, in spades and frequently, where else would it be fun and accessible?
New piece in JazzTimes on a Coltrane-themed triple set. Just a little review.
Today while waiting to go on the radio, I came up with the cover idea for There Is No Doubt: Storied Humanness. There was a photo on here a while ago. This photo:
It's an X-ray of heart muscle. The cover would be something like this, with the words of the title written into the X-ray by erasing the pink. So the words would be white. I will eventually beat these people, and I will be everywhere. The books will be everywhere. I have to have faith. Faith means making my plans, too, for when that comes to pass, and even as it comes to pass, and before, or whatever blend I am in at the moment of January 18, 2022. I don't execute them, because I can't, but I design all of my book covers and I always will. Every other book cover I see is so generic. They all look the same, which is fitting, perhaps.
Watched Alison's Birthday, an Australian horror film from 1981 that was very well done. Excellent little movie. Well acted. The likable leads--a college-aged boy and girl--have awful fates. We like them, root for them, they appeal to us, and one is murdered at the end and the other is worse-than-murdered. Not a lot of films will take this approach with characters of this nature. Another one that does is The Mummy's Tomb (1942) in which the likable leads--a couple of buddies--from the prior entry in the series (The Mummy's Hand; 1940) are killed off early on. Universal did nothing of the kind at the time, so it's pretty shocking to see the duo dispatched as they are. In the Universal horror pictures of the 1940s, fun is emphasized over scares. There are chilling moments--the crypt sequence, for instance, in 1943's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man--but glee is stressed over scares. Sobering scares, like those that we get with Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein from the previous decade. But not so at the start of The Mummy's Tomb, which is the discordant exception. Keep the viewers honest, one supposes.
I have started a new band called Mouth Explosion. We shall specialize in country jazz with a soupçon of Hungarian airs. For those about to explode, we salute you.
Listened to the Strokes in-studio at an Australian radio station in 2001--more on this anon--and Stravinsky's Piano Concertos, with Philippe Entremont.
Comments