The authorial Woodstock and assorted art matters

Tuesday 5/19/26

Woodstock—Snoopy’s pal—wrote a book in the Peanuts strip called My Life as a Bird, which is actually a pretty good title. I’d read that and you know Woodstock would have spurned AI. It wouldn’t have provided us the avian view of the events surrounding A Charlie Brown Christmas, though, as Woodstock wasn’t around then despite what some anachronistic paraphernalia would have you believe.

For instance, at Christmastime we'll see Peanuts wrapping paper and gift mugs featuring the skating scene from the Christmas special, and there will be Woodstock. Same with Halloween items incorporating images from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. No Woodstock in either special! He debuted in the strip in 1966 but didn't come by his name until mid-1970.

There was a time when I was baffled by how people said that the Yardbirds' Little Games was such a lackluster, even bad, album. I understand now, of course. People come by what they think they're supposed to think, and then they just keep repeating that thing. They aren't actually going through the process of thinking. There isn't critical thinking.

This is how what I call the associative dominates our culture in which people say many things as if they thought them and believe them without ever having thought about them and not believing them (or not not believing them, if you follow me).

Little Games is a worthy LP. It's quite varied and artful. For me, it's even kind of a favorite. I can revisit it time and again. We might think of it as being to the Yardbirds what Wild Honey was to the Beach Boys, though I think a case can be made for Wild Honey as the best Beach Boys' album, whereas it would be hard for Little Games to top Roger the Engineer.

Person-altering moments pertaining to art for me: walking in on the 1931 Bela Lugosi Dracula playing on Creature Double Feature on a left-on TV in an empty room at five or six. Reading Three Investigators novels covertly until midnight at ten. Seeing A Hard Day's Night at fourteen. Hearing the Who's Live at Leeds for the first time (that Roger Daltrey scream near the start of "My Generation" which was edited out of all reissues since 1995, the shame!). Spending an Easter alone listening to the Grateful Dead.

Rewatched Summer of 84 yesterday and will definitely include it in this piece on summer horror films. Enjoyable movie. One problem, though, is instances of linguistic anachronism. People take some saying from a later day and they plug it into a period piece. They should know better but they don't. They just assume it was used or don't bother to think it through.

Listened to "A Mass of Cobwebs," a BBC Light Programme adaptation of M.R. James's "The Tractate Middoth" that aired in 1959. The Light Programme broadcast many of the Beatles' early BBC sessions starting with their first in March 1962 when Pete Best was still on a drums, and also the Carleton Hobbes/Norman Shelley Holmes and Watson stories. Solid and fun adaptation which isn't much known about even by James enthusiasts and numbers as something of a rarity. Easy to locate, though, once you're aware of it, and well worth hearing and then listening to again at future dates.