Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1200
MIgraines, hypochondria, Dave Winfield, Christine Keeler photographs, Vuescan, FIDLAR sorta.
Mornin’! Issue 1,200 wow that is so many issues of GMHHAY what a crazy world. It is 8:10. Jane is playing in the next room. She has consented to go to camp for the second day in a row, very exciting. I am listening to my new vinyl copy of Broken Social Scene’s underrated Hug of Thunder.
The migraine I had all day yesterday, that made me miserable and cranky, has cracked a bit, it is lessened but not destroyed. I am now convinced it’s the Stevia’s fault. Or the Zepbound. But if you Google the side effects of both, neither has “headaches” listed. But Stevia has a healthy paranoid minority of people out there that are convinced that it causes headaches. Plus who needs an excuse to switch over to Caffeine-Free Diet Coke for a couple weeks, not me, that’s for sure.
This migraine thing is making me crazy. Are they worse? I feel like I’ve had them my whole life and I’ve only recently become consciously aware, become annoyed. In my personal narrative, some subconscious breaking point was hit, I identified that this thing has been annoying me for decades, and decided now I want to pay attention to it and fix it.
Emma is deeply dubious of this narrative. She thinks they have gotten worse lately.
The whole thing also ties in to hypochondria. If my thesis is correct, and they’ve always been there, what’s really happened is that I have become a wuss and decided that something is a problem now, that wasn’t a problem before. Which is deeply antithetical to my historical approach of ignoring all illnesses. I consider myself a scientific person, but I also consider myself a magical person, capable of willing illnesses away. For a person who was born with an ultra-rare congenital spinal disease, this is a deeply weird belief to hold, but, then, I didn’t know about that disease for forty years. You would think news of its existence would convince me that my magical thinking is untrue. Maybe it has. I don’t know. I am torn asunder. What is that quote from Serentiy/Firefy? “But you fog things up. You always have. You spin me about.” My personal philosophy of personal health and wellness is adrift.
And boy oh boy does this sound like an invitation to give me your personal philosophy of health and wellness. It’s not, it’s not.
I had a friend once (hi friend, reader, I miss you) whom I saw once and he told me he couldn’t go to live shows anymore because he had tinnitus. A year or so later I saw him dive into the pit at a Public Enemy show (I think it was PE) and just before doing so he told me that it had been hypochondria, that he had imagined the tinnitus. I absolutely believe both of those things. I am wondering why now I didn’t ask more questions but, then, you know, personal prying. But I think about it all the time: am I imagining these headaches? Or am I imagining I’ve always had them?
I felt like such a fraud yesterday, but also cranky and in pain. It seemed imaginary, because I had, presumably, been able to ignore them previously in life so why not now? Just ignore it. Emma pointed out all these concrete, physical markers and traits: she forced me into my dark bedroom away from screens for an hour. And it felt so much better. The world was too much. But also I got shit to do.
Also have you seen Julianne Moore in SAFE? I guess we all develop our own thesis about what happens to Julianne Moore in that movie, and maybe I should re-watch it, but in my younger, cockier viewings, I fell firmly into the “she’s a hypochondriac” camp.
Aging sucks. Cut more and more healthy things out, just get less and less healthy.
Or, in the words of the majestic FIDLAR: “I found out as I got sober life just sucks when you’re older, I found out when I got older life just sucks when you’re sober.”
Who needs the Dali Lama when you have FIDLAR. Fuck it dog, life’s a risk. One of the better things I picked up from running Tumblr community. Thank you, Nate Auerbach.
(Actually, coming full circle on Nate and Broken Social Scene, Nate did Myspace Music promo before we hired him at Tumblr, and he was responsible for the Broken Social Scene Presents: Kevin Drew show at TT The Bears that I went to, met Kevin Drew at, and got the amazing one-show gig poster for that show, that hangs in my daughter’s room on this day twenty years later).
Emma and I finished a TeeVee show the other night, Upload, the sci-fi-ish comedy on Amazon we have enjoyed for two seasons. I did not enjoy this season as much, mainly cuz it went a little further in the romantic comedy hijinks direction and not the core sci fi plot, which is, of course, a perfectly reasonable thing for a comedy to do. But I am getting pickier about my shows, I guess. Now I am sitting here, we are sitting here, trying to decide what to watch next. We could watch House of the Dragon but, god, so many dour people plotting about personal power in an ultraviolent world. We could watch The Boys, but, god, so many dour people plotting in an ultraviolent world, with a bit more comedy. I never watched a show or a thing because of the violence, my academic rationalization circuitry never got its jollies off on pretending ultraviolence was some worthy category of art and exploration. But I would tolerate it for a good show. And I still can, once things get rolling, but boy is it a turnoff.
And as I was falling asleep musing about this, I wondered: what am I going to watch for TV when I’m old? Am I even going to watch TV? Am I just gonna sit there and watch the latest Star Wars show or some milquetoast shit? (The Acolyte is fine, by the way. Why don’t we just wait till the mystery is resolved before judging it people are so weird imagine judging PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me” (the song) before the good part kicked in). This is why I want plotless sci-fi. This is why Youtube will win. I swear to god, right now, if someone made an old-timey Star Trek corridor set in their home, and had two people just sit in the set and act like they were historians of the 20th century and banter about current topics, I would watch it religiously. If some circuitry in the wall broke every once in a while and they had to spend an entire episode fixing it, bickering about firewalls and flux capacitors, well, all the better.
Shit I need to make this don’t I? Sean, Nick? Anyone in? I can probably find room for a Jeffries Tube set.
When I was a kid Dave Winfield was my hero because, and you might not know this, before Dave Winfield hit the winning hit in the 1992 World Series, before he was a 12-time MLB all star and seven-time Golden Glove winner, Dave Winfield played for the Alaska Goldpanners in Fairbanks, Alaska. In the season of my birth, Dave Winfield hit a grand slam homer out of the Goldpanner’s Growden Park in Fairbanks, Alaska that crossed the street and flew into the Fairbanks Curling Club (a legendarily good athletic venue in its own right hello Vicky Persinger).
Anyway this week Dave Winfield came back to Fairbanks to attend the unveiling of a statue commemorating this event and I swear to god if I knew he was coming to town I would have gone up there to see it. Sorry mom, sorry Val, but Dave Winfield in Fairbanks? I am on a plane. My god, I’m tearing up what is wrong with me.
If anyone has about 25,000 British Pounds I could have, that would be great. It seems that Christine Keeler’s personal portfolio of the photos and contact sheets from her notorious photo shoot with Lewis Morley is for sale. Not just the main, iconic photo, but thirty-four of them. This is insane I want this so bad:
In the summer of 1963, the Sunday Mirror and News of the Word published the first of several articles featuring provocative images of Christine Keeler, the key figure in one of Britain’s most sensational political sex scandals. Lewis Morley’s portraits of Keeler, including her iconic pose sitting astride a copy of an Arne Jacobsen chair, would go on to embody the sexual permissiveness and freedom of the swinging sixties.
Shortly after the exposure of what became known as the Profumo Affair, Morley was commissioned to take publicity photographs for a planned film about Keeler’s life-story. The session took place in Lewis Morley's studio over the Establishment Club in Soho’s Greek Street and resulted in three film rolls of 33 frames. In the first two rolls Keller is seen in a dark top, whereas in the last one she appears undressed yet partially hidden by the chair’s back. While the movie was never released, Morley's photographs were leaked to the tabloids. Their daring nature scandalised society as much as the explosive revelations of the love triangle.
The remarkable box of press photographs offered here was sent to Keeler by the photographer. It comprises all three known contact sheets accompanied by nearly an entire set of individual prints that Keeler would use to make images available to the press for publications. This is the largest and most complete group to ever appear at auction. It is believed that no other set survived in Keeler’s possession.
I always knew that subscribing to the Sotheby’s mailing list was going to bite me in the ass someday. I miss getting the print catalogs. Boy, pretending I was rich for a few years there was awesome.
I watched Scandal at too young of an age. Or maybe just the right age. Actually I watched it again a couple years ago and it is still a brilliant film. Everyone in it is so good, but John Hurt and Bridget Fonda especially — might be her best role.
Oh hey update on previous topic: Like two days after that long post about Apple and security and Facebook and Google, Facebook logged me out again so maybe I was wrong, I don’t know, I give up. But also I had this problem with my SolarEdge app and I finally solved it by turning off Ad Block Plus completely on the page. Not just deactivating it within the plug-in, but actually turning the plug-in off completely in Safari Preferences. Mysterious. Might have to do the same with Facebook too, but, then, that’s what they want you to do, isn’t it, tinfoil hat tinfoil hat.
Oh hey also I wanted to put in a good word for the greatest little piece of software that has been improving my life for nigh on twenty years now. And I think in that twenty years, I have maybe given the developer money three, four times? And I love it so much, and it’s just the best: Vuescan, a third-party, independently made scanning software app. Now, look, I suspect a lot of you still don’t use scanners, but I still do. Just scanned all the Polaroids that have been on the wall of the Timehop office for over a decade. Am slowly cropping them down and making a nice little album.
One of the great things about Vuescan is that it works with any scanner. Which means you can go to Amazon, whenever you need a scanner, spend like $60, or splurge $80 for the superb Canon Lidoscan, and not bother installing the bloatware that comes with the scanner. You can just install Vuescan instead. Just the nicest, most minimal, polite little app. Doesn’t install shit all over your computer, doesn’t insist it runs in the background all the time, doesn’t make you pay every month. God bless the mysterious Ed Hamrick and his surname-free accomplice Dave.
Emma did Jane bedtime last night, thanks to my migraine, so I have no stories of Jane to regale you with. Though this morning she came into my room to wake me up and climbed into bed and it was just so great, she’s been a little angel for about 24 hours now, which I suppose means the levee is about to break, but boy, was that nice. She even brushed her teeth this morning without complaining. A+ no complaints.
OK well you be careful out there.
Today’s Media of the Day is “Rubber Glove Seduction” by Programming the Psychodrill, aka PTP, because rumor has it that Hypo Luxa and Hermes Pan, aka Paul Barker and Al Jorgensen, have buried the hatchet and will be working together again. On the next Ministry record? On something else? TBD. Would they consider, would he consider, working with Chris Connelly again as well, go full-on classic Ministry? Maybe get Ian MacKaye back involved and go out on tour for Rare Trax right? Who doesn’t want to see Pailhead live? Right? But even if it’s just another Ministry album, I am here for it. Paul Barker, man. Yessss.
Okay byeeeee.