Placeholding

Tuesday 3/23/21

It's quite difficult to do this journal and do everything else. Truthfully, it's difficult to do any of the one single thing I must do, were that the only thing I did. If I just wrote fiction. If I just wrote essays. If I just wrote op-eds. Did the books. If I just pitched. If I just played bill collector.

Someone asked me yesterday--with that tone one employs when they think they know the answer, but they're just making sure--if there was any other author who did anything remotely like this journal. I said no, because how could you, even if you wished to? There'd have to be perpetual fecundity of mind, and courage. Plus, rapidity of creation.

What one will see, I told this person, is blogs that have a new entry every four months, and the entry says nothing. Tells you the meaningless books of poetry by that writer's academic crony friends that they've pretended to read since the last post.

Which is one way of saying, this is a placeholder entry, but of value, still. I will do a proper one soon. I've written 3000 words today, between fiction and nonfiction, just walked three miles, and I have to jump in the shower now and hop on the radio in a bit. So, a quick post about recent works of art in which I've been embroiled.

There is this John Coltrane bootleg, from Seattle in late September 1965. Ascension had been recorded in June. This is the end throes of the Quartet--which is augmented Pharoah Sanders and Donald Garrett.

Watched Shane again for the first time in a while, recommended it to someone I know and their whole family. Why on earth would you watch Netflix mediocrity when you can watch the likes of Shane? Netflix, like Twitter, is rotting the culture. Turning us into what I call settlers--the bad kind of settlers. When we will settle for anything pumped out at us, with ever diminishing standards for entertainment, let alone art. What one will notice in this illuminating trailer is that the famous end scene--an ongoing conversation of sorts--though a one-sided one--that takes place across an escarpment and during the evening, was also filmed during the day. Neat, yes?

Here's an English pastoral horror film that virtually no one knows, from 1970, called Robin Redbreast. It was shot on color video, survives only in 16 mm black and white. I'm writing about it.

Here's Zeppelin in Osaka on September 28, 1971. You can hear them cover the Beatles' "Please Please Me" and "From Me to You."

Listened to Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius.

And the Jesus and Mary Chain in Edinburgh in 1985. They play "Jesus Fuck" twice, which is kind of funny. I have a thing for when bands play the same song twice at a gig.

Watched Game 1 of the 1984 Stanley Cup Finals, in which Grant Fuhr wins the game, and the series, really, for the Oilers. Actually very similar to what the Islanders' Billy Smith had done the year before in Game 1 against Edmonton.