Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1344
What if Polly made noise her whole career, artist evolution, weekend quickbooks hell, Emma's amazing Kamala event next weekend, grape trellising, Lina Khan and the "affordable luxury handbag market"
Good morning, happy Monday. It is a school teacher work day, so Jane is with me. She is doing her 750 words. I am proud of her.
We are listening to the new Mercury Rev album, Born Horses. Been listening to vinyl all weekend, it has proven immensely rewarding. I can’t afford to buy everything on vinyl, so I will still have to use the streamers, but I can sure try. This album is weird. Lot to love, a few things that irk. But I am okay with that. Artists age, artists change. It is hard to get your head around: we want them to stay the same. This weekend “Rid of Me” (the song) came on the shuffle, furthering my thinking about PJ Harvey and my FOMO about everyone in Boston going to the show last week. Took me back to that show on the Rid of Me (as an album name, it’s capitalized. As a tour name, it’s not. Makes sense in my head, at least) tour at Citi. She was… she was an absolute force, an absolute giant. Was one of the craziest things I ever saw up to that point in my life. Could Polly have maintained that level of abrasiveness, intensity, unrelentingness… for a lifetime of art? Would she be as respected as an artist? Well, no, she mellowed out a bit for the very next record and then got huge with “Down by the Water.” She had to change. And it’s not like Merzbow or Muslimgauze ever got huge maintaining for an entire career an artistic positioning that assaults the listener. PJ Harvey is who she is today because she evolved.
And look at me, I suppose. I used to write these long detailed fever dreams of erotica and oblivion and now I write about Band-aid organization. Though weirdly I had about the same readership levels. I wonder if I combined the two would I double my readership levels, or would they cancel out to zero? Or stay exactly the same?
Almost tempted to try that.
Spent the bulk of the weekend working on the Pool finances and the Boat & RV storage facility construction finances. Construction financing is hard! Banks are slow to give you money and contractors want to get paid immediately. You gotta coordinate with them all and get bankers to actually go to your construction site, which is a kind of amazing, old-school thing that still happens! I suspect this one thing is why local banks still exist, imagine Bank of America or Chase actually attempting to do this lol.
Also attempted to reconcile the pool and contracting bank accounts in Quickbooks for the first time ever and.. I mean. Wow. I really should take an accounting class or something. I had this, like, obviously insanely naive belief that you didn’t need to reconcile accounts in Quickbooks, because they, you know, sync with your bank.
But no! They do not sync with your bank, they download the transactions from the bank. So, for example, if you pay your Amex bill, and the bank has a charge of X dollars (I was going to say dollar-sign-x but there is no way to do this in Substack without it auto-replacing those two characters with the stock price for Elon Musk’s company that does not even have a stock price boy computers are smart and actually I guess that’s topical let us continue), with the memo “payment pending,” but then in a day the memo changes to “payment thank you,” for example… well. Quickbooks will think that is two different charges.
There were 500+ transactions in the bank account and I had to manually reconcile them one-by-one, and found about 40 errors, totalling like $100k. It took six hours.
Of my weekend.
I just kept telling myself: “this is what you choose to do in your free time. You believe in being productive and you have chosen this company as your project, you should be happy to doing this” and I kinda was…
But also I spent almost my whole weekend doing finances.
I finished Sunday morning (only because it turned out that Megalopolis opened next weekend, so I had an extra three hours).
Oh also I had Friday off from work but I spent that on Pool and Storage stuff too. Went to the bank, met with the banker, worked on some pool finances stuff. So, three day weekend, in the end I got about 3 hours to go to Chore House and do physical labor.
In that time, I got the trellises done and all wired, and all the grapes climbing the trellis poles and following the trellises, that was pretty satisfying. I also got a printer set up at Chore House and figured out how to use the printer’s internal web server to change the printer’s name, which was not very exciting.
But I did get to use my super cool, super clean greenhouse a bunch, and my god, I love that thing so much. It was such a… such a risk to spend all that money and time on that thing, it could have easily ended up being something that didn’t look great, or I didn’t use, but nope on both counts. Looks awesome and I love using it.
Okay here is a cool thing: if you are in the Triangle, you should come to Emma’s event this weekend, Kids for Kamala. I want to tell this: In the last couple weeks, my wife dreampt up this idea of an event where kids color yard signs and postcards for the Kamala campaign, and then she designed some awesome postcards and yard signs for the event, and then proceeded to learn how to screen print, setting up a new screen printing dark room in the utility room and perfecting (well, getting good enough) the process of exposing the screen to light and developing the emulsion and making the screen and then screening the ink onto the signs, all of that. She learned how to do all of that. And now she is having this event next Saturday.
I don’t have to tell you how insanely bad-ass that all is.
Anyway if you live around here and have kids, you should come. Here is the Facebook event page.
Have you heard about Lina Khan’s action blocking the merger of the company that owns Coach and the company that owns Michael Kors because the two combined companies will have a monopoly in the market of “Affordable Luxury Handbags?” Not “fashion” and not “handbags,” but “affordable luxury handbags.” That is the market. This is the most extreme example of one of Lina’s preferred new tactics, which is the narrow definition of markets. I can’t remember the exact verbiage, but her anti-trust suit against Amazon was because it was in the “large online superstore” marketplace or something like that: not retail, not even online retail, because in the grand ecosystem of online retail, Amazon is not that big of a force, and it is an even smaller force in the world of retail.
I guess I have sort of mixed feelings about this? On the one hand, sure, try anything you can to find a new tool to stop the manifestly obvious monopolies in our lives. If the courts refuse to consider something a monopoly if, for example, no money is involved (social media) then sure, find another tool. And I suppose you gotta throw a ton of cases against the courts and find a court that blesses your weird-ass interpretation so you can use that decision in your next case.
But also, the affordable luxury handbag market is not a thing! If Coach decided to double the price of their already luxury handbags, not a single competitor would follow suit. They would think “oh yeah, ho hum, Coach is trying to go more upscale, they’ll be back.” Neither of these companies separate or combined has an iota of price influence on the handbag market as a whole.
Am I crazy? Does this seem completely absurd? Do we really think when lawmakers made the antitrust laws they envisioned people just completely making up new markets?
But, then, what is a market? What makes one? It seems to me that a market is something where when you need something or want something, all of the options for purchase exist in “the market.” I need a new sink drain pipe, all my pipe options are part of the plumbing market.
If I need a new handbag, all my options are in the handbag market. I do not believe there is a single person who has ever thought “I need a new handbag that is fashionable and cool, but I will only shop for bags in this price range, if I find the perfect bag for $100 less I absolutely refuse to buy that.”
And I don’t even know who’s shopping for “large online superstores.”
I feel bad about this! I am against monopolies! I decry the paralysis of our legislative branch and support the executive branch’s efforts to transcend that deadlock and get something done (well, you know, assuming there’s not a Republican in office).
But this seems… stupid? And absurd? And a waste of finite resources?
I would love to hear the defense of all this. I need to… god. I hate to say but i think I need to go dig up more interviews with Lina Khan.
The next.. oh, 28 hours of my life are intensely, ridiculously scheduled. I am too old for this sort of thing. I won’t really see Jane until Thursday evening at this point. That makes me sad.
But we had a nice weekend. We did Bojangles and Dunkin on Saturday then spent the morning together downstairs in my office. She played with her Playdate, and watched a little Bluey and did some crafting, but eventually we both realized she was sick and had a fever. Exhaustion set in. By Sunday she was feeling a lot better. We went to the playground in the morning to meet up with some friends, and then she and Emma went to our neighbor’s pool in the afternoon. At bedtime she said explicitly that she didn’t have enough energy for Daddy School or Dance Party, so it was… more screens, alas. She’s obsessed with this real life civil engineer who plays engineering video games. That’s her thing this week: Timberborn, Cities Skyline and some oil drilling game.
Hours of it, if I let her.
Moody and Quiet playlist for you today, mostly new but I threw that Virginia Astley song on there just now because I finally found a copy of Hope in a Darkened Heart to my liking and I am listening to it right now and it is great and Ryuichi Sakamoto produced it and did all the keyboards and I sure wish her third and fourth albums would get vinyl issues it is ridiculous they’ve never been pressed to vinyl. Everything else is new, methinks.
OK well tomorrow will be one of those sad-ass editions from an airport, then an edition from the Nimbus office (the last one), then another Airport edition so it’s gonna be a pretty spotty week for GMHHAY, not gonna lie. Though maybe it will be offset by me actually doing things and having things to write about? But I doubt it.
When did plot ever help anybody write.