The Ulysses (James Joyce) of radio, T.S. Eliot at the Y, Louisa May Alcott and men, Bob Dylan self-assesses, great looks in film history, Hitchcock's drollness, Son House's train, Poe's POV, and more

Thursday 6/11/26

A recording I've been listening to lately: T.S. Eliot at an NYC Y at Christmastime 1950 talking and reading his poetry. Eliot's verse (and 1950s sci-fi) anticipated our current collective and individual--for lack of a better word--state of mind and humanness (or absence thereof) just about as well as anything.

The Great Gildersleeve was a mid-century radio program. It’s excellent—one of the best of this medium that produced so much art that is seldomly considered as being amongst the best produced in this country, though it should be. Gildersleeve was for the masses. Very popular.

In one episode—and this is typical—a character starts discussing Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men. It becomes this big conversation with real life implications down at the pharmacy between Mr. Peavey and Gildersleeve. We used to be exponentially more educated. The meaty part of the curve could get this. By educated I don't mean we had more schooling, as in, sat in classrooms more. If you stare at screens, you will be stupid. You won't be able to think if you wanted to, which you won't want to do at any cost anyway. Including the cost of your life being worse, the lives of the people you know being worse, and the world being worse.

If someone today recognized the name Louisa May Alcott, what they'd likely then do, given that people have no self-awareness and are sufficiently narcissistic that they immediately assume that whatever is true for them is also how it is for you (cf. when I'm in the Monument and someone sees me going up for the third time since they've been there and says, "This is his third time," as though I couldn't have been doing this prior to their arrival; and also because any number more than one is greater than the amount of times they could do this thing, thus, they're going to cap your number at the lowest number possible which in this case is what it is because they can't take away what they've witnessed; they're projecting the lowest number anyway, though, because they don't know for certain that you did it more times than before they got there; they're not thinking this through--this is how we've made ourselves to be wired in our narcissism and ignorance and in how we project constantly/totally, and almost never reflect instead), is rush to correct a person like me who'd made that reference, saying, no, don't you know, it's Little Women, not Little Men, delighting in being able to think--wrongly, stupidly--that they were able to do so.

People have no clue what they don't know and actually think they know when they're clueless. There's no reason for them to think they know anything, save that no one else knows anything, so who is going to correct them? What contrast are they ever going to see? Virtually everyone's the same. It's a world of virulent, perpetual projection. Projection is right up there with hypocrisy, the lack of any self-awareness, the hatred/fear/envy of greatness, a lack of literacy and communication skills, the absence of an individual identity, the avoidance and incapability of accountability, and the absence of realness (or just being able to be real), as one of the dominant themes of these times.

I'll give you an example from yesterday. I posted something online about the Who's cover of "Baby Don't You Do It" and the Grateful Dead's cover of "Big River," as pertaining to drummers. Someone couldn't wait to make a comment that, no, "Baby Don't You Do It" was by the Band, not the Who, like I, this guy, the guy who is the expert, is wrong and you, person who just says things and doesn't know them, got me. Come on.

I usually handle these things graciously as an act of mental discipline, because how I feel and how I act are two separate things here. What I responded with yesterday was this:

Yes, the Band covers it as well but their version is less an out-and-out showcase for the drummer. The Who's best known versions of the song come from 1971 (I recommend San Francisco and Dayton), but there's actually an off-air BBC recording from 1965 that turned up in recent years.

Later I'll discuss how The Great Gildersleeve is akin to the Ulysses (as in the book by James Joyce) of radio series.

Edgar Allan Poe's first person stories have a radio-like element to them. That is, in radio programs, you have a lot of narrators telling you what they're doing and thinking as they think and do it. They narrate their own actions in real-time and their responses to stimuli. It's one of the challenges/things that the best radio writers have to try and get around, but most don't bother. Poe didn't either really. It's like people talking to themselves out loud. "That's a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I shouldn't eat it. It's late. I'm going to eat it, though. Okay, I've started eating it. Tastes pretty good..."

One of those remarkable musical (and extra-musical) moments of telling fortuity: when Son House was playing "Walkin' Blues" for Alan Lomax at the Clack Store in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi in August 1941 and we hear the sound of a train passing through and its concomitant whistle. The store had electricity, which is why they made the recording there. Among the great American musical documents. Been fascinated by it since high school. If you don't know Son House, I suggest listening to him.

“In actual fact, what we have are irremediably sick and futureless mass-men, whose ideal is amporphousness, whose ethos is formlessness, and who hate nothing so much as discipline, form, definition.” —Friedrich Reck, Diary of a Man in Despair

That's how we are now.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents is just so consistently good. It also has flashes of the wit that colored his best British films like The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps. There isn’t much wit (some humor, yes, but that can be different) in the US pictures. Hitchcock got broader for the American masses, but the television program retained that idiosyncratic drollness which is at its height during Hitchcock's own intro and outro segments. You can tell that those segments were a huge part of the appeal for him of doing this show.

No one made for a better heel in film history than Dan Duryea. Nails it, is it, every time. And yet, you’re drawn to his characters and never quite loath them and usually like them to some degree. He’s so oily.

The bus scenes in It Happened One Night (1934) are eminently believable. People packed in tight but finding ways to get some rest. Rain against the window that makes you feel shut in and safe, but only by a thin layer. The lulling whir of moving down the road through the night. A sense of adventure. Of life somewhat more improvised than usual. Seeing people in "naked," vulnerable ways, as in a hospital. A kind of mobile, just-this-once community.

The scene with the beds of straw in which Claudette Colbert's character looks at Clark Gable's is one of the great "just looking" scenes in film history. You can tell so much about how she feels about him and who she is and how she feels about herself from the way she looks at him. Another like this: Myrna Loy's character looking at William Powell's in The Thin Man--also from 1934--as he plays with his toy gun for Christmas. Speaking of 1934 films: Jean Vigo's L'Atalante is another picture from that year that is strong on looks.

There was a time when it would have seemed inconceivable that you could listen to the first takes of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Elvis’ “That’s All Right (Mama),” Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” but there they all are.

Rewatched Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) for a piece I’m writing. I love how it’s always autumn in Hammer films. When the characters venture into (or flee to) the forest you know there will be fallen leaves underfoot and denuded branches. An entrancing perma-October/November.

After completing Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan said that he didn't think he'd be able to make an album as good as that one again. One can say that an artist isn't always the best judge of their own work. I don't think that's true. Maybe not based on what they say, which is often them trying to get themselves to believe something they know in their heart isn't true. "I honestly feel like this is my best work yet." But I'd say Dylan was pretty spot on in his assessments, both pertaining to others and his own work. Blonde on Blonde is a better album, but he's close to the truth in what he said about Highway 61 Revisited and is more or less correct in spirit.

Buddy Holly wasn't rock and roll's first major talent, but he was among its first visionaries. An artist of vision like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, and few others. It's almost shocking how talented and different he was as a singer, writer, guitarist, studio maestro. Even something like "Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues"--who would sing that way? It went against everything anyone else did. These days, you'd be discouraged from doing just about anything that makes an artist great.

The frogs in Frogs (1972) (rewatched as well) are more like approving Fourth of July spectators than agents of death, which they leave up to all the other animals (those cunning anoles!). I wonder what Ray Milland thought about starring in this after once starring in The Uninvited (1944).