Wednesday 11/30/22
The text below is from a post this morning on my Facebook author page. I thought it worth including here, too.
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This is really good. It's a half hour radio interview from last night about 1964's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I've been going on this show called Downtown with Rich Kimball for a number of years now, dating back to 2017. They have on all kinds of people from the worlds of film and music that everyone knows. I took a different approach from the start. I wanted to create a unique archive of spoken word art and entertainment, in which I spoke about everything with peerless expertise, the depth, quality, rapidity of the mind on display. Whether that was art, film, music, literature, current events, radio itself, my own work. And so many things in between. So much everything.
I was always hyper-conscious of creating a record that people could return to, study, use for the writing of books. No other artist had ever created a record like this. We have surviving interviews, for instance, of Orson Welles, but not as many as one would think. Certainly nothing approaching this record, which totals hundreds of hours. The interviews are additionally preserved on my site, as part of the On air section, along with other shows I've been on, podcasts, NPR appearances.
Because of what I achieve--on my own, sans any assistance, and great resistance, in a diseased, evil industry--and because of what I undeniably, inarguably am, and what I necessarily must call out at times on the blog, I also want to give further indication of me the person. The blog does a lot of that. It's nearly 1900 entries now, having launched in the early summer of 2019.
My life is lived openly in front of the world--by which I mean, whomever chooses to read that document that I instigated as its own kind of literature. A journal to be collected between hardcovers in time. Pepys did what he did with his diaries, and Thoreau with his journals, and I've done what I do.
It's been important with so many people in an industry who actually want me dead--which, if anything, is understatement--to provide further proof that here is a good man, a kind man, a person who helps other people. Here is how he sounds, here is the easy laughter, despite what he is going through. The torture of historically unprecedented discrimination--because of virtues.
I don't normally provide much in the way of preamble on this Facebook author page, but I do so in this instance, because it seems like it can't hurt every now and again to install some background, burnish some context.
People will tend to think that anyone will be like anyone else, more or less, with a comparable range of capabilities, because that's how people are. But that's not going to be a brush that comes close to working with me and what I am, and, more importantly, what I do, and what that represents, and what it can do in this world when those who would hold this person back are unable to do so any longer.
Everyone knows the Rankin/Bass version of Rudolph, but I am certain no one has ever heard it discussed this way.
