The Peanuts gang and the Grateful Dead, Cheers, and Dostoevsky; holiday noirs; M.R. James and WWI; the Beatles' "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party"

Thursday 4/9/26

Peppermint Patty would be the member of the Peanuts gang most likely to follow the Grateful Dead on tour. She'd do it for the community more so than the music, which she'd like but not think too much about. Take it as it is, in the moment. Linus would be the member of the Peanuts gang most likely to think hard about "Ripple."

One of the many great ideas in Peanuts is the one in which you go to someone's yard and there's a stand where you sit and you tell your problems to another human being. People would say, "It's called therapy." I'd expostulate, "Not so fast, wags."

Therapy involves paying a stranger and as if that stranger has insight into the human condition, which few people have ever had. The greatest of artists, yes. But not many others. That's the premise, though--that because this person went to school, they can speak to this thing. There are other aspects and avenues of appeal for some--that they're effectuated to begin talking aloud about that which they rarely, if ever, give internal voice to. People usually don't talk. They don't do real talk. By which I mean, they don't do their side of a conversation in real talk, as the person they really are.

I've suggested this recently, but I'll say it again: among the very rarest qualities in the world right now is realness. Complete realness. This is me as I am, for no other reason than it is who I am.

That means no agenda, nothing performative, and in untrammeled good faith.

Though the signage of Lucy's stand explicitly states that the service being offered here is psychiatric help, it's more about listening, neighborliness, people being available to each other in the community, and that includes in a one-to-one format. An across the street one-to-one format, not within the office block in the office across from the root canal guy's office.

What's important to keep in mind here is that these are people who know each other ahead of time. Which isn't the case with therapy. They have a preexisting relationship of some sort. This means we're closer to a level of friendship than of mental health services. And as we see in A Charlie Brown Christmas, Lucy is willing to be out there in all weather. This isn't literal. People who are there for others are there for others. Nothing infringes on what you could call their being there-ness.

Many people think they are there for others, but that's usually in theory only, and what that theory presupposes is that life won't simultaneously be happening. They make these promises to someone--and to themselves about how they'd be regarding someone else--as if life would not simultaneously be busy being life, and doing things that life does, and throwing what life throws at a person. But as soon as life winds up and tosses a ball that person's way, they say, in effect, "I can't be there for you, this ball just hit my mitt," to keep it Peanuts-y with a baseball metaphor.

In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky has a character speak to how everyone needs a somewhere. In Cheers, that was the bar, or, more accurately, the people in the bar for the people of the bar. Charlie Brown has a somewhere--we're not limited to the one, though many of us never have a real one--when he goes to Lucy's stand. The somewhere is also a someone.

For Easter I watched two Christmas film noirs, Cover Up and Mr. Soft Touch, both from 1949. Easter and Christmas are similar. People attend performance of Messiah at the latter, but Handel wrote it for the former. Works for each (and all the year 'round).

Cover Up was quite good. I will watch it again at Christmas. There are no "bad guys" in it. How often can that be said about a noir? The bad guy of the film is dead before it starts. The hero, who we never meet, dies off-screen. The announcement about this is made at the town's tree lighting ceremony. It's the kind of town we find in the five-part Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar episode, "The Nick Shurn Matter."

M.R. James's "A Warning to the Curious" is set during the time of WWI, which raises the question of why Paxton isn't fighting in the war. Is he the English equivalent of a draft dodger? But we also have him weakening national security by digging up the crown, if the legend is true, and in the story it certainly is. But he's certainly not a bad fellow.

"A Warning to the Curious," like "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," works so well because it's more than a ghost story, which is rare for James. His ghost stories are usually just that, as pleasurable as they may be--including the better ones like "Lost Hearts" and "The Mezzotint." They don't trade in what we might call the currency of truth. Of human truths. "Count Magnus" is a bit of a dry run for--and a less successful variant of--"A Warning to the Curious."

One of the best moments in James's fiction is when the group of three is beginning their walk back from the barrow where the crown has been re-interred, and one of the older men points out to Paxton that he's left his coat behind and that won't do, and then Paxton revealing that he has his coat with him.

"Though tonight she's made me say...I still love her" and "I've had a drink or two and I don't care..."

I like the energy of the Beatles' "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party." It's to Beatles for Sale as "There's a Place" is to Please Please Me as a work of honest introspection. Lennon's acoustic rhythm guitar playing is similar to what we encounter so often throughout A Hard Day's Night and perhaps the last example of this quintessential Beatles sound with the heavy skiffle inflection.

You can't overstate how important Lennon's acoustic guitar was to the Beatles' 1964 albums. That sound has roots in Liverpool circa the second half of 1957. Lonnie Donegan roots, but the top of this tree is a long ways away from the bottom.