Bits and Pieces -- Thanksgiving crumbs from Substack
Bits and Pieces -- Thanksgiving crumbs from Substack
The Last Waltz, "the last Beatles song," "The Emergency" by Denis Johnson, "Lucinda Williams grew up chasing Flannery O'Connor's peacocks" by Dan Stone, Country Music by Ken Burns
Greetings, turkeys. If you ignore everything else on this list, this Thanksgiving, please consider reading, and viewing:
Steven Hyden: “The Last Waltz Is The Best Thanksgiving Movie Ever Made”
Here’s the gist:
The Last Waltz is a concert film directed by Martin Scorsese about a star-studded “retirement” show by The Band that occurred 40 years ago on Thanksgiving day in San Francisco. The co-stars are Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, Neil Diamond, and about another half-dozen rock stars from the ’60s and ’70s. Every year around this time, I try to watch The Last Waltz at least once, in the way that people watch A Christmas Story or It’s a Wonderful Life whenever mid-December rolls around. I’ve come to regard The Last Waltz — and I preface this by offering sincere apologies to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles — as the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever. That’s not simply because The Last Waltz takes place on the holiday, but also because this film embodies what’s wonderful, horrible, hilarious, and moving about one of this country’s most sacred annual traditions, and how many of us manage to survive it. Other films have used Thanksgiving as a backdrop. But to me, The Last Waltz is Thanksgiving.
Allow me to recount the plot of The Last Waltz: A dysfunctional family of five brothers has decided to stop living together. Before they split up, they invite a coterie of friends dressed in colorful suits and floppy hats over for a holiday celebration. Despite years of pent-up resentment — the brother with the amazing voice loathes the brother with the amazing haircut, whom he views as disloyal and undermining — all parties agree to put these tensions aside and put on a good face in front of the guests…
Thanks to the audiophile politicos at The Fifth Column podcast for unearthing this bit of music journalism.
The Beatles, “Now and Then”
Turns out A.I. is good for something, as far as art is concerned. Peter Jackson uses the same machine-learning audio restoration technology he employed on The Beatles: Get Back (2021) to bring you “the last Beatles song,” from John Lennon’s solo home recordings, provided by Yoko Ono.
Denis Johnson, “The Emergency”
A triple shout-out here, beginning with “America This Week,” the Friday podcast brought to you by journalist Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone, Racket News) and author Walter Kirn (Up in the Air). These two writers discuss weekly news by funneling current events through a book discussion—usually involving a short story or novella listeners can easily digest in one week.
(To anyone desiring a free gift subscription, I have one to hand out.)
This week’s text comes from a Denis Johnson novel (named after a Velvet Underground lyric), Jesus’ Son—also adapted into the 1999 film starring Jack Black and Billy Crudup, along with a handful of other counter-cultural greats including Dennis Hopper. What I didn’t realize was, this episode in the novel/film originated as a short story. Which, as Walter Kirn points out:
…more than any other that I could have chosen, represents 30 or 40 years of MFA Program consensus. It is probably the most aped and revered story on the part of people who are actually studying creative writing in college. And so it’s a rather simple story set in an emergency room somewhere in the Midwest. What happens is that a patient comes in with a knife sticking out of his eye, as this orderly who’s on drugs is mopping up hallucinated blood from the floor of the emergency room. Georgie is having a bad reaction to some stolen pharmaceuticals that he ingested, and his friend, who’s the narrator, is trying to get some of the pills for himself. In comes a guy with a knife sticking out of his eye, and it causes a kind of paralysis among the nurses and doctors because they don’t know what to do. It’s a little like what we’ve been discussing earlier [American institutions in paralysis]. All the experts sort of freeze…
“Georgie” (played by Jack Black in the film), meanwhile, removes the knife without thinking, saving the patient’s life. The two orderlies then leave the hospital on a Don-Quixote, Fear-and-Loathing-style quest through the phantasmagoria of the American Midwest, tilting at windmills no one else can see.
To recap—“America This Week” for brilliant book discussions, Denis Johnson’s short story “The Emergency” as a metaphor for American incompetence, and Jesus’ Son for wild comedy in the vein of Cervantes and Hunter S. Thompson.
“Lucinda Williams grew up chasing Flannery O'Connor's peacocks,” by Dan Stone (and Lucinda Williams)
Turns out late-blooming musician Lucinda Williams’ father was a great poet who took her to Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor’s house, Williams herself is a great essayist, and Dan Stone of Radio Silence and Hey Pop knows everybody. Read his account of meeting Lucinda Williams, as well as William’s memoir, originally published in Radio Silence: Literature and Rock & Roll.
Country Music: A Film by Ken Burns
This Friday’s upcoming history of medical confidence man John R. Brinkley, the “Goat Gland” doctor who founded border radio station XERA (which I teased last week in a story about a magic fence), comes to you from Ken Burns’ Country Music documentary. Shout out to the source material.
Happy listening, and Happy Thanksgiving.
—The Third Ear