Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Batman, Leo McCarey, Miles/Mobley, Marple, Orson Welles, Dylan, Cream, John Clare, The Wire, Ford/Hawks, Who, Ben Cooper, Oasis, Wes Montgomery

Tuesday 6/23/26

A Sunday morning music recommendation: the Nat King Cole Trio's The Complete Capitol Transcription Sessions. These were cut, usually in a single take, between 1946 and 1950 for distribution to radio stations for airplay. They're loose/aerated in the best way--not sloppy, but with that in-the-moment feel. People tend to think Cole was "only" a singer (albeit one of the finest), but his trio was an outstanding jazz outfit.

If someone asked me--especially someone accustomed to rock and roll--where to begin with jazz, the clear-cut answer would be Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens. We posture so much in our society for the gains of the dashboard, which aren't gains at all. The person who barely reads takes a photo of Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Dostoevsky books for social media approbation. Would-be jazz buffs name drop Coltrane. Armstrong will organically hook you fast. And this is art to see you through your life.

That's quite the sizable assist from tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin on Wes Montgomery's Full House.

Miles Davis wasn't the biggest Hank Mobley fan, despite hiring him for his band. Davis had grown tired of the drama of Coltrane's prolix solos, and Mobley ought to have been an apt change of pace, but the two didn't click. Which is strange, because Mobley was a wonderful player, among the most soulful and tuneful. The complete Black Hawk sessions with the pair from April 1961 has a place among the best live jazz recordings of that period, when it seemed like classics came out monthly.

Downloaded a high-definition set of the complete Batman series with Adam West and Burt Ward. I'd watch this in first grade while I was having breakfast before school. I looked forward to that. I also looked forward to school, but I'd be nervous, too. I wanted to do well. At the time, this wasn't a show with humorous elements for me. I took it seriously. There was much potential danger for our heroes. I loved the colors of it. Still do.

Found a copy of Bob Dylan's 6/13/26 Berkeley show that I said I'd been looking for with the versions of "Trying to Get to Heaven" and "I Shall Be Released." Saw a comment yesterday in which someone declared that Dylan has never been better as a liver performer than he has this summer.

People say what they want things to be rather than what they are. Could someone actually think this? They'd have to be bad at listening, which is a skill. But that's not bad like being bad at basketball bad--that's not being able to catch a ball no matter how slowly it's tossed to you bad. The Dylan of the 1966 tours and on stage in 1963, 1964, 1965, is...I mean, can you really listen to the Philharmonic Hall set from Halloween '64 or the Town Hall '63 performance or Berkeley in December 1965 or Liverpool 1966 and a show from last week and think that 2026 show is better?

Presence. Openness. We must be present and in order to be present we must be open both coming in--as in, open to this--and open in the moment. Listen that way. Watch that way. Be that way. Listen to people speak this way. Always be present. That's the challenge. Be present here, then move over there and be present here. Don't just say things. Don't not think things. Don't not think things through. The more you think, the more you think things through, the more natural it becomes, because it is natural if you're human. That it isn't is because you've disassembled your inherent humanness.

But just as someone in this world can look at an orange and say it's green, someone can hear music--which isn't the same as listening to it--and pronounce it something it isn't remotely. And no, it's not subjective. Nothing is subjective. There's preference. But things are things. Saying "It's all subjective" is a cop out, it's an attempt to avoid accountability and deflect from shortcomings and/or lack of effort. People are always trying to cover their asses. They're preemptively trying to cover their asses. Trying to cover their asses after the fact and shift things around. It isn't them, or someone like them, it's you who is the issue, don't you get it, man, with thinking things can be...known?

We wouldn't say that nails on a chalkboard is better music than...pick whatever you want here...Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. And if we can't do it with the one thing, we can't do it with any. So it then becomes a matter of your ability to understand and see or hear something for what it is. Because it's not possible that someone could honestly believe that nails on a chalkboard is better than Sgt. Pepper. That if they had to listen to an endless recording of one or the other on a loop for the rest of their life, that they'd pick the nails on the chalkboard.

This is an extreme example, yes, but do you see how the extreme example negates every any would-be veracity of it's all a matter of subjectivity? If we can do it with the one example, we can do this with any other.

What changes? Degrees. The less extreme the degrees are, the harder it can be for us to tell what's what. But that doesn't mean it isn't what it is. It means we're shifting accountability because we don't want to say we lack, we aren't perceptive enough, educated enough, cultured enough, smart enough, etc.

Preference is different than subjectivity. Now, someone may like a Bob Dylan 2026 summer recording better than a recording of Dylan in Manchester in 1965 (yes, I meant to write 1965), but to declare it better? You should be able to know better than that. But, I suspect, this also comes down to people never thinking about what they say is true or not, and just wishing to say it. Feeling like saying it. Nothing stops you. Ignorance runs unchecked. It's a free for all. What's the value in being correct and sharing truths?

Sunday I was comparing copies for sound quality of bootlegs of the Who's 1967 Dallas show and one was much better than the other. This is a dynamic tape and piece of rock and roll history. The live Who of 1967 was a beast to be reckoned with. This is an all-timer live performance. It's an audience recording, but it has depth and the warmth of a good audience tape. You can hear Keith Moon's cymbals fine. The Who have moved out of their rhythm and blues era completely here. They're trippy, adventurous, poppy, raw, heavy metal-ish, arty, clever, and loud, loud, loud. You get "Pictures of Lily" and "So Sad About Us." What a tape. Put it in the Who live canon with Leeds, the BBC sessions, Fillmore East '68, SF '71, Philly '73, and several others.

There are days that I think Leo McCarey is America's greatest director. The range. And, as Jean Renoir said, he understood people.

Watched The Bells of St. Mary's (1945) yesterday. Certain parts don't work. The idea of withholding a medical diagnosis and treating the patient "secretly" without their awareness or consent is perverse and forced for the sake of the plot, and pretty demented on its own. The priest goes along with it until he doesn't, and when he doesn't it's for his own reasons.

You run up against things like this in classic age films. You sort of watch around them when you do, if it's worth doing so, and it is here. The backstory of Patsy's parents also wasn't smartly handled. Her mother is made out to be something she really isn't--a kind of drunken slut living in a self-made gutter. But we see her, we see her home. The estranged husband/father is made out to be some cad who pumped her full of that seed, then bailed when she got pregnant and then never looked back for well over a decade, but when we meet him...it's like he didn't even know he had a kid and yet...he did? The whole parental thing doesn't make sense in this film. It seems more to be the case that they're horrible parents, but nothing about they way they carry themselves--especially the mother--really bears this out. It doesn't make sense.

But the picture is really about the nuns, which is to say, most about Ingrid Bergman's character, and the child Patsy, and when we focus on these things, the film works and is quite touching and even enlightening. It's witty as well. I really like when the boxing tutorial scene with Bergman and the boy who'd been bullied, and then the playground fight, after which the bullied boy makes an offer of friendship to his former nemesis after toying with him some and then putting him on his rear end. And the scene when the two nuns go shopping for a boxing manual and the store owner tells them he has one written by this pugilist who won X amount of matches in a row until he was knocked out by so and so, and the nuns whisper to each other about asking him if so and so has a book. That kind of humor doesn't date. It's as funny now as it was then because it's smart and true. It has wit. You'd be highly unlikely to encounter humor like this in our world.

Also watched Howard Hawks' Red River (1948) again. Uneven. Doesn't quite know what it wants to be and changes too spuriously. Here's John Wayne's character storming into camp, shooting a guy as goes, then ready to kill his sort of adopted son, and a few minutes later it's all "aww shucks" style cutesy-wootsy. What kind of film do you want to be? Too much is shoehorned into this one. Like Joanne Dru's entire character, insofar as this is even a character. You can't just go, "Okay, you've known each other four seconds, we need a love story, so now you're in love!"--especially when the love "story" starts much closer to the end of the film than the beginning. Then it's more like dictation than part of a story.

There are indoor Westerns and outdoor Westerns. Hawks was more of an indoor filmmaker. Think of Rio Bravo, a superior picture--you think of it happening indoors, right? The singing in the jailhouse, the hanging out, the saloon scenes. Hawks excelled here. He'd take his time with it. The plot advanced, but he was less burdened by the task of being linear. Outside Westerns call for more linearity.

What are some of the best scenes in Red River? Campfire scenes. The night scenes at rest, even when danger isn't far off out in that night. Why? Because these are essentially indoor scenes that just happen to be outside. The sugar thief. The tough talk. The friendships. The amusing business between Walter Brennan's character and the Native American about the store bought teeth. That's Hawks in his element.

We're made to read from off the page at the beginning of the film and then throughout, but the first time we're meant to read something in full. Note in these older films how much less time a piece of text was left up on the screen for. The expectation was that people could read and understand what they read in that time. You wouldn't see this now either. People don't have the reading skills. Not that this ever required true skill. But it's another sign of how much stupider we are now. As the film goes along, we get lightly highlighted bits of texts lit in such a way as to stand out from the surrounding text of the page their own because they're are key takeaways. This is handled subtly, as if your eye just happens to land where it lands, rather than by design.

John Ford was so literally linear with his very outdoor Westerns that he treats the screen as if it were a compass. Think of it this way: the top of the picture represents north, the bottom south, the left side west, the right side east. Note how men tend to move when outside in a Ford Western: it's right to left. Like they're going across the country.

Listened to the "Binary" episode of The Magnus Archives, having seen it billed as amazing radio that is oh-so-scary and, again, was left thinking about how limited people's experiences are. They have no idea what they don't know. They chose to limit what they partake of. They don't know what things can be, how much things can be. It's a restricted purview. Then, from within that narrow field of vision and experience, and based on what's there, they dish out the encomiums and statements of grandiosity. You have to get out more to have a clue as to what's really what.

Heard something I wasn't anticipating ever hearing as I tended to research for my Orson Welles book: a long lost episode of Inner Sanctum starring Welles from September 23, 1944. This is presently the only surviving Welles episode of the show. There's some jazz crossover, too, for the episode was recorded by none other than Rudy Van Gelder, the engineer on so many classic Blue Note sessions. Sort of like Bing Crosby "taping" Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. Van Gelder was apparently an Inner Sanctum fan. That's endearing.

I watched Dressing Up Halloween: The Story of Ben Cooper, Inc. I was mildly disappointed with it. Didn't get a sense of Cooper's background. The nuts-and-bolts of his business. Why he started it, who he was as a person and in business before he started it, why the business ended and what that looked like as it tapered off. It felt kind of like a performative set piece for his grandson to have an extended on-camera moment for himself. I didn't care for the faked vintage footage of kids in Ben Cooper costumes. There should have been a lot more from the actual time period. Surely there were available home videos? Plus they could have used vintage advertisements, shots from stores.

Downloaded the new Super Deluxe Edition of Cream's Wheels of Fire. Always loved this record. I like everything by Cream and consider the release of their 1966 debut, Fresh Cream, to be among the most exciting events to happen in rock history. Isn't much in the way of unreleased goodies with this set, unless you're talking stereo and mono reference reels and a phase corrected version of the original studio material. But it's still done up right with the possible quibble being that the album is "separated"--that is, the live material doesn't play immediately after the proper studio material at any point.

Downloaded 9/19/94 show at Club Quattro in Nagoya, one of the best gigs of their Definitely Maybe tour. That's when you want to hear a band--right around the time of a classic album. First albums sometimes get a bigger spike. I mean, if you heard the Stone Roses the week that their debut came out, they were probably going to be pretty charged up, right? Doesn't have to be a first album, though. Listen to the Grateful Dead the week that American Beauty came out.

Also downloaded the complete run of Miss Marple BBC adaptations starring Joan Hickson, which totals twelve films.

During that previously described multi-day stretch of torpor and uselessness, I watched the first two seasons of The Wire. Downloaded it and throwing it away as I go because it's not worth keeping. I tried to watch this show however many years ago and was just bored and stopped. I'll perhaps watch it now until the end because I do try and finish things and it's my job to know things, but again, we come back to that idea of people need to experience more. This isn't great art. It's not great TV even. It's pretty paint-by-numbers. The familiar beats of these shows.

I know what's going to happen, when it's going to happen. I know when we're do for a risible sex scene that feels like a caricature of all these sex scenes in all these things. There's no depth. I don't care about these people. It's cliches, tropes. You aren't showing me what's behind the veil. I don't care down through the bottom of my heart and soul. I don't care about these people at all. I'm not provided with unique insight into human nature and humanness. I mean, okay, you know these terms, the argot, of the police life. Fine. But so does every cop. So that's it, then? You don't connect with anyone in this. And the race stuff has the quality of an after school special without the earnestness.

I also felt that Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul were trash, and The Sopranos even worse. I don't know how a discerning person could watch The Sopranos and not outrighly laugh at it trying to be all tough and dark when it's no tougher and darker than The Flintstones, which was a much smarter show.

You're upset that I said this? Want to "get" me? "Screw you, guy saying this thing!" Go watch the pilot episode right now. Watch it again after reading this. Go watch that heralded-as-brilliant first episode of The Sopranos. The perfect pilot and all that. You know, the one that you're told is studied in colleges, blah blah blah, which is something people like to say because of the sound of it, the same as they like to say, "The Sopranos is the modern version of Shakespeare," when it isn't as if they're shuffling lines from the Henriad through their heads as they do so now is it?

Actually sit there and watch it critically. Eyes and mind fully open. Detach yourself from the noise, the parroting, the expectations, the associative. It's risible. One lazy ass cliche after another. (And no, these don't "only" seem like cliches now because of the show's vast influence and this was all original and cutting-edge at the time; they were cliches then.) Broad as the palm of your hand. It's like the bologna version of so-called great art.

There doesn't need to be bad blood here. Things are things. That thing is that thing. Go watch something better. Wouldn't that be better? Try Bresson's A Man Escaped.

On a side note: fat middle-aged guys in shows and films being veritable Bruce Lees has a special appeal to fat middle-aged guys out in real life. Like the fat middle-aged guys depicted as Bruce Lees--you know, fight masters--wouldn't throw up by stair seventy-five if they tried to run as far as they could up the Bunker Hill Monument. But again, so much comes back to that idea of being achievable. This is the basis of who we'll like, tout, award, hype, in our society. A society where mediocrity is king. And that's why you get the whole critical and consensusly critical razzmatazz of The Sopranos.

I've also been reading John Clare's prose. An entry from his journal on Saturday, December 25, 1824:

Christmass day gathered a hand ful of daiseys in full bloom--saw a wood bine and dog rose in the woods putting out in full leaf and a primrose root full of ripe flowers--what a day this used to be when a boy how eager I usd to attend the church to see it stuck with evergreens (emblem of Eternity) and the cottage windows and the picture ballads on the walls with Ivy holy Box and yew--such feelings are past--and 'all this world is proud of'

Gotta get out.