Tuesday 1/5/21
I know the News section hasn't been updated in months, the Books page is incomplete, and, of course, the Music, Film, and Literature pages in particular are missing many links--hundreds, actually. I will fix all of this soon, or get someone to help with at least the design problems I'm dealing with, if not the actual uploading of the links, since I need to do that personally. I write so much, and that's my focus. I publish so much, and that always means more work for the site.
It's odd to me that people are upset that the Eagles did not try harder to get the Giants in the playoffs, or that anyone would blame anyone but a 10-loss team--10 losses!--for failing to make the playoffs. You should be embarrassed to make the playoffs with that record. But say you did. Okay, now shed the embarrassment by beating someone. But to not make it and whine? The Eagles don't owe any team anything. You don't owe it to anyone to do your best to win when losing a game that means nothing to you can help you. It's a competition. Done in the short term and long term. The Eagles had nothing to gain in the former, so they played for the latter. That's shameful? It's a business. That's fair play. They made a decision for the company, for the longer haul. Why would that surprise anyone or draw any ire? You want to make the playoffs, don't go 6-10. I'm seeing all of these "the Eagles should be punished" posts. Again, does no one cogitate any more? They made a decision for their business. It's not the responsibility of the Eagles or any other team to look out for the interests of any other team. We're not playing "Pat-a-Cake" here. It's not just that people are so soft--they are--it's that they don't think. They gnash teeth and do rah-rah. Don't gnash and rah-rah. Think. Not even deeply, if you don't want. Just be practical. Cool it down, and apply a modicum of sense.
Wrote quite a bit this AM. It's go-time, with a book. Needs to be written, and needs to be written now. I will work on it more after I exercise. Not pleased with my showing yesterday. Finished listening to all of Billie Holiday's Commodore recordings for Always Tasted: A Listener's Guide to Living in the Art of Billie Holiday. I am hyper-conscious of the reality that I can write the best novel, turn around and write the best short story, turn again and write the best music book, turn once more and write the best film book.
Kamala Harris stealing that anecdote (the "fweedom" thing) from Martin Luther King and using it as her own--writing it into her personal hagiography as something she actually said as a child--is disturbing. Truly disturbing. Theft isn't fair play. I don't understand people who plagiarize, how they live with themselves. I think you have to be both very insecure and very arrogant. They often go together. Something in your brain clouds over that something came from someone else. You have to have this built-in mentality that you would have thought of it anyway, if you really wanted to. If you were really trying. So what's the big deal in taking it as yours now? An editor as well known as any in the world would steal ideas from me like this. The most specific ideas. I mean ultra-specific. And they'd turn up in his magazine, as things he wrote. (I also had means, which I won't go into here, of knowing the exact hours when my ideas were in the very process of being stolen.) I don't name this person yet, because, as I've said recently, I try as long as I can to keep that door open before I say what I know about such a person on here. Keep the door open with others there, maybe. The arrogance that you have to have right now, in 2021, to steal from King and take his anecdote and claim it as your own, as some memory from your life, speaks to a narcissism that encroaches well into mental illness. Someone wired this way is also someone who'd see no problem having sex with someone else to gain a position and advance a career. When people do the "You go girl!" thing, I wonder how they really feel about women and girls, what they're okay with as a message, and what they don't bother to look into at all, because they prefer to celebrate something that doesn't exist, has no actual foothold in reality, let alone a substrate of honor, integrity, merit. I'd wish to do a better job for my daughter, personally, if I had one.
Merit is the great black hole of America in our age. Mediocrity is the sun. Cronyism, simple labels, laziness, the lowest-level of expectations, anger, self-loathing, self-doubt, insecurity, are what make the planets move round.
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Ran three miles. Here's tonight's Downtown segment, a conversation about BBC wintertime horror from the 1970s, an early take of the Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love," the baseball Hall of Fame, an archival concert release from the Stooges. Again, there is nothing like this in the history of radio, because how could there be? Who could do this? Who would know all of this? And it was funny as all get-up, too.
Listened to the Johnny Dollar episode, "The Broderick Matter," which aired 11/14-18/55 and reminded me of an unstable, deceitful, life-wrecking, ghosting woman I was engaged to. Dollar has an exchange with someone she screwed over, and he summarizes this kind of person well. Dollar does, that is. Says to this guy what he needs and doesn't wish to hear. The lines of description are spot on.
I slept all the way until six this morning. That shouldn't be happening. Strong work on the book, though. I'll really let it fly tomorrow. This Barnett Newman painting, Abraham (1949), is discussed in the book.
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