Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1349
Seeing an old friend, Emma's Kids for Kamala event, babysitting a newborn, seeing Sigur Ros, seeing Megalopolis, really quite the weekend.
Good morning! Hello! Happy Monday. Heart goes out to everyone in Western North Carolina. We are fine, we are on the other side of the Piedmont. We had some bad rains, but only for like 15 minutes, not even in the top ten worst we’ve gotten in our decade here. But western NC — Asheville, Boone area — hit very hard. No way in or out, no power. Not good! Will be days before the extent of the damage is even known, and of course the mountains of Western NC are a retirement haven, and recently listed as one of the best places in America to avoid climate change so, yay, goody goody.
RIP to Kris Kristofferson, a true hero among men, one of the only celebrities to stick up for Sinead after the SNL Pope photo incident. Here is a photo I took of him in 1997 (on film, in black and white infrared, cuz 90’s) with James Merchant, Ismail Ivory, and a pre-Kubrickian Leelee Sobeiski. Leelee was radiant, but Kris, at age 61, was the stunner of the group. What a handsome fellow.
Listening to the new Wolfgang Press album, this morning, A 2nd Shape. Can’t quite believe I am writing the words “new Wolfgang Press album” in the year 2024, but here we are. Very exciting. What label is it on? Is it on vinyl? Where can I buy it? Who knows! Okay okay, I have googled. It is on some label called “Downwards,” which also puts out some Justin Broderick stuff, and Discogs tells me it will have a vinyl pressing, but it is not on their website. Or Rough Trade. A mystery! The game is afoot.
Incredibly busy weekend, just insane, so busy, just so many amazing things happening. Each one of them deserves their own GMHHAY but I will lose the juice if I wait, like, five days to write about one of these events. So instead they each get a paragraph or two, one section each, and that is it. GMHHAY does not accomodate your life, it rules it. Or something.
Friday night I saw my old friend Abigail, one of the most important people in my life and — she would laugh at this — but one of the most reclusive. Also got to see her daughter Chai, whom I have known since she was born, though I haven’t seen her in years. She is 20 now, she goes to MassArt, she is awesome. Seeing Abigail was great. Picked them up at their airport hotel — they were in town for a conference — and we got dinner and roamed the aisles of Target at 10 PM on a Friday like we were bored college kids, loved it. Oh and while there I found Emma’s supposedly-discontinued cereal that I have been looking for in every grocery store for, like, six months. Not sure what is up with that. New old stock? it’s back and Target got it first? Anyway, Emma was very excited. Abigail was awesome, we had just a lovely time and I am so happy I got to see her. A+ would see again.
(We ate at Olive Garden because of some college-level travel irony request on Chai’s part, also because we were in Suburban Durham and my god I could write a whole treatise on that experience what a crazy alternate universe).
I forgot to take a single picture, though, so I am kicking myself for that. So instead here is a photo of the Selena recordI bought at Target.
Went to bed late, finished the First Age segment of Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales and boy have I heard enough about the Sons of Hurin, Tuor is kinda a dummy but Turin really takes the cake not sure why I gotta hear so much about this moody-ass dolt. We have moved on to Numenor in the second age and I have recently been made aware that the island of Numenor was shaped like a star and the word “land” in Numenorian (don’t at me) is conveniently “star” so each of the star arms of Numenor has a name like “Adustar” or “Forostar” — because “Star” means “Land,” get it? Just a complete coincidence, not lazy writing at all (ahem Sauron Sarumon).
Saturday was bonkers. Got up, took Jane to Bojangles and Dunkin for our Saturday treats morning. Twas lovely. Then it was time for Emma’s Kids for Kamala event, which was a huge success and just about the cutest thing you can ever imagine seeing — all these kids ranging in age from like three to teenagers coloring signs and postcards for Kamala and for voting. It was so great. Emma partnered with a friend of ours in the big neighborhood next door and she posted it to all their neighborhood groups so we got a really good turnout. Colored a hundred posters, I think maybe 50 yard signs. Again, I am completely impressed with my wife’s drive on this, learning to screen print and doing the whole thing. Just awesome.
I think there are a few signs left? Maybe? Don’t quote me, but if you got a kid, who would color a sign and you’d put it out, let me know and I’ll see if I can mail you one.
I have so many great photos — I was taking a lot of pictures before I hunkered down and started coloring postcards like a kid. But, you know, posting photos of other people’s kids on the internet. I will confine myself to these two.
(crowd got a lot bigger than that but I did not take any good distance photos of the whole crowd at its peak).
Of the 100 postcards that the adults wrote messages on and the kids colored, about half of them are going to western NC where the mail is suspended. Emma went and looked up the zip codes where mail is delayed, separated out the stack. We will wait on sending those, I think. Still thinking through the strategy of that.
While at this event, my pool partner texted me that he had to go to the hospital (he is fine) and his wife needed help with the baby so I got to babysit a two (three?) month old Saturday afternoon and it was so fun. Do they cry? Sure! But, you know. Diaper, bottle, gas, repeat. Eventually you figure it out. Took a little adjusting but by the end I had little baby Chloe napping on my lap while I was playing Civ on the computer and she was just so cute. A great time was had by all. A+ would babysit again.
Then later on Saturday it was off to Durham to see Sigur Ros, whom I have not seen, the archives tell me, in over 20 years. Sigur Ros has been doing their thing for 30 years! That is crazy. This show is with a 40-piece orchestra, derived from, I believe, the Wordless Music Orchestra out of New York (don’t quote me on that shit do I need to Google Kagi that? Yes, Wordless Music Orchestra. Man must be fun to be in that ensemble.
The show was abslutely fantastic, though I quibble with the track selection. Sigur Ros is at their best when they are doing the post-rock highs and lows, loud quiet loud. Which they did do on a few of their older hits like Hoppipolla and Staraflur (no Svefn-g-englar though!) But they are also enamored with the New Icelandic Classical movement of their contemporaries like Hildur Guðnadóttir, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Ólafur Arnalds and the like. And that stuff can get a little samey! It is an absolutely confusing feeling to be witnessing something so completely amazing and majestic but also… to be a little bored? It’s weird. I would go see a symphonic drone band in a hot second, and never expect them to do anything but drone. But I expect Sigur Ros to…. also rock out? And they did a little on this hits, but it was… rare.
Maybe a little “Sæglópur” that woulda been rad.
But my god, so beautiful. And the sound, the sound. It was our first time at DPAC, and the acoustics are rightly celebrated. And whomever did sound for this monstrously complex outing, I take off my hat to you.
Seats were amazing. I was so on it with the ticket onsale, I actually bought tickets further back than were available because I wanted a bit more of a view. Seventh row, but on an aisle in front of us and to our right. So much space! Perfect views!
Back to DPAC next month for The The so that will be fun.
Speaking of The The! Their song “Lonely Planet” is the song over the closing credits to Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which I went and saw on Sunday. Did I love love love it? Um… maybe not? Maybe one love. I admired it, I enjoyed it, I was never bored, I liked it probably more than just about everyone else. It was bonkers! It was fun! It was all over the place in plot and tone! It was vaguely sexist, it was old fashioned in its whole great man thing, which was also almost completely diametrically opposed to the actual theme of the film, and that contrafiction went unexplored! It had so many plot branches that went nowhere and man I love that shit, I have loved that shit all the way back to Star Wars the clone wars what? Be hilarious if in, like, forty years we got a Megalopolis sequel that explained the satellite or the bank shit.
I view the film as a series of homages and jazz riffs: on Wenders’ Until the End of the World, on the conceit “what if Robert Moses kept his youthful idealism,” on Hamlet, on Almydera and Luhrman and Coppolla’s own Dracula, on opera and on Roman politics on the Lumiere brothers, MAGA, so much more. It’s too much, if I’m being honest. It does not all gel. It is a wish list, a bucket list. And that is fine with me.
It’s exactly the sort of thing I need to see in a theater because my attention span would not brook this at home, except for Aubrey Plaza and Chloe Feineman and… actually almost every woman actor in the film was phenomenal, even if they did not have much to work with in terms of, you know, non-man-based motivation.
Coppolla is not going for woke here, he’s content in his old Hollywood tropes. All of them. At once.
I’m mostly content with a rich old man spending $150 million of his winery money on this instead of giving it to his children. I am deeply torn on whether he should have just, you know, donated the money instead, I mean, honestly, he probably should have, but, then, art needs to exist, etc etc I dunno man I am not in college this is the real world. Don’t make me think about that.
Whew! That’s it? I think? Oh, right I did a bedtime last night and it was mostly a catastrophe. Jane refused to put on jammies or brush teeth so we just sat there in a tense standoff for, like, an hour. I am absolutely positive I could have made it fun and gotten her to do these things with cajoling but I just didn’t want to. It is tedious and it drives me crazy when she just decides she needs to rebel and I don’t have time for it. So instead of doing fun things I just subjected her to carpentry videos and every time she spoke I told her to go put on her jammies. It was monstrously unfun for both of us and probably stupid but at the time I thought I was parenting. It’s interesting because she doesn’t actually need to “learn” this because she will do it at school for other people —
oh man I feel like I’ve written this a thousand times. I will stop.
Justa mix for you today. Yeah I put that Eminem and Jelly Roll song on here also Jelly Roll was on SNL last night and I think I might like him? That AA song seemed pretty good. Thank you Jon Whitney for alerting me to julie they are great. I think this ends the Mike Krol run that started from his live appearance at Merge 35 like two months ago. New Wolfgang Press, very very exciting. And I actually love the new Father John Misty song? I think I mentioned this to you Friday. Isn’t that guy problematic or something now? Did I imagine that? Given his lyrics that would not be overly shocking I suppose. But, damn. Solid track. Overwhelm ‘em with art, Josh.
See you tomorrow.