Saturday 2/10/24
All of the loud, drunk people outside at two in the morning. Go home.
At Christmas I'd written that in the very early morning I could hear the electronic chimes of someone's car door being opened outside like they were going to work, always going to work, dedicated day in, day out. I've since been disabused of this notion. On my building there's an entire building that is a single person or family residence. It's actually a building I think about a lot as part of a goal. This building has a rather large clock that hangs on its outside. The chimes are from the clock. I hear them as if they are calling to me at these ungodly hours when I arise and create, work, and fight.
On Thursday I walked six miles and did 100 push-ups and three circuits in the Monument. Yesterday I walked three miles and did 100 push-ups. I'll do better today.
Watched Panic in Year Zero, a 1962 film starring and directed by Ray Milland. Various US cities were attacked with nuclear bombs. Milland and his family were off with their trailer for their vacation, so they survived, and then they try to survive the post-nuclear fallout. A strange project. Frankie Avalon is also in the picture as the Milland character's son. Milland disliked acting and he didn't need the money, so this must have been something he wanted to do as a director. Seeing Milland in 1962 slug people is also a bit odd. Call the film a product of its Cold War times you can get through without much difficulty, but that you wouldn't watch again. Personally, I don't watch films to watch them once, nor do I read things to read them once. It's no different with music. You wouldn't listen to A Hard Day's Night once in your life and that was that.
Also saw a rather disappointing documentary on Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles. People don't know what to say because they don't have a clue so they speak in these general terms of praise that could apply to anything. I don't want that. I want intelligence and someone who actually knows. Speak with specificity about what is happening in the work. Most people just want to look a certain way, be perceived as such and such a thing. "I'm a smart guy because I act like I like this smart guy thing."
Listened to an episode of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater called "The Follower," which works a familiar trope of these kinds of shows. A guy who is a heel in life hears footsteps following him. Eventually, that person--for this is how this trope works--comes face to face with whomever is following them or who they are following. CBS Radio Mystery Theater was also a product of its times. There are elements of soap-y 1970s drama. Saying the word "sex" on TV clearly meant a lot to the people making those shows at the time, like now they were allowed to do this grown-up thing and often it hasn't dated very well, and CBS Radio Mystery Theater wanted in on that. That's one reason why it doesn't stack up with some of the best programs off the dramatic radio medium. Ironically, you go back twenty years before CBS Radio Mystery Theater and something like Gunsmoke would prove actually shocking and "grown up."
Whoever wrote that line, "The man with the action-packed expense account" for Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar deserved a raise. It's a great, snappy, spot-on line that stayed crisp and relevant. I have long wondered what Dollar means by "incidentals." Presumably not hookers. But what? Gum and cigarettes? Actually, if you imagine he means hookers each time he says it it's pretty funny.
Listened to Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique (Colin Davis/Wiener Philharmonic) and the Vaccines new one, which I listen to at least once a day of late, for the most part.
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