Saturday 10/10/20
I was mostly useless today and need to get my act in gear tomorrow, even if it feels like I could work for 100 straight years and make the best work ever and it will not matter. I have to try harder. I arose and listened to Orson Welles in Lucille Fletcher's "The Hitch-Hiker" that was broadcast in the long-running Suspense series. She wrote it with him in mind. No one ever mentions this, but she took the idea from E.F. Benson's "The Bus Conductor." I listened to the Jam's first album and a collection of sea shanties from the Revels Chorus and Band called Homeward Bound. I sent "Show Me Your Knees" to the fiction editor of The Atlantic. Watched some of Star Wars (1977). A major project that will take years is downloading huge amounts of music that I have made lists of, getting up to speed on technology. I want to be in my house as soon as possible, and every piece of music perfectly organized so I can find it and play it on the stereo, even if that's via the computer, which I assume can be hooked up somehow. I have no clue how to do this right now, but there's a lot of work involved as I figure this out. For instance, I'm trying to secure every single live recording by the Who. Today I tried to hunt down a bootleg of the Animals' complete BBC recordings from 1964 to 1966 and have, I believe, the first half of it now. My earlier copy--a bootleg--was not as complete. I'm awful at this--I upload things to iTunes--after I convert them to mp3--and they all jumble together rather than stay in folders of individual albums. There must be 300 files on the desktop of things I have written, so it's not like I have a clear working space even there. I need to get that organized, and then just be methodical and efficient. Surely I can handle this. I located better sounding versions than what I had of three Animals concerts from Paris in '64, '65, '66. I worked on a title for a book. Figured out what I'd discuss on Downtown on Tuesday. The way that works is I send Kimball a note over FB messenger that looks something like this:
"How about an in-depth segment really getting into Dracula and Frankenstein from 1931? They’re the benchmarks and starting points of American horror. We can talk about their stars, directors, how they were perceived at the time, marketed, their cinematic techniques, Biblical overtones, how they differ from the books, Jack Pierce, the cinematographers, their place in film history."
I found a pdf copy of a book of selected entries from A.C. Benson's--he's E.F.'s brother--diaries. Was a good buddy of M.R. James, and wrote some ghost stories of his own. Homosexual. Suffered from depression. Also wrote "Land of Hope and Glory."
Mistakenly thought BC was off today, missed what sounded like a really good game against Pitt. BC QB can sling it.
Anyway. Time for bed. Perform better. Elvis didn't make it on playing guitar, and you aren't going to make it by sitting around and giving in.
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