Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1,000
Jane's first day of school, issue #1,000, Philip Kaufman and Indiana Jones
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Oh god. It is just now occurring to me that I need to make a decision about whether or not I put a comma in the issue number in the headline of this post. Why did I not think about this before? It is too much pressure to make this decision on the fly. The number 1000 looks weird without a comma, so I am going with “1,000,” but that may change because the number 1001 doesn’t look too weird without a comma oh god I am going to overthink this for months.
Thank you for all of your suggestions for things I could do for this one thousandth issue. There were a lot of good ideas. Unfortunately, I am not going to do any of them. Were I to spend too much time celebrating this milestone, it would call into question my lifelong habit of not overly celebrating birthdays and anniversaries and holidays and god knows what that would do to my personal relationships, which barely survived the initial examination of this unfortunate lifelong habit.
An update on the “Boston songwriter from the 80’s” on the Soundcloud yesterday. The writer was neither from Boston nor from the 80’s, so, you know, go figure. His name is Steve Frisbie, the band is Frisbie, and they are from 2000’s era Chicago. C’est la vie.
Today is Jane’s fist day of school. It really is something that these two events happened on the same day. It’s like fate, three point eight years ago. The first run of the morning routine went pretty well. On Monday during our practice run Jane came down for breakfast and said “you told me a few days ago that you would have breakfast ready when I came down,” and it’s true, I did. I mentally calculated how much sleep I am going to lose over the next twelve years because of that ill-conceived comment and it worked out to fifteen days of solid sleep. Awesome. It is the right thing to do, though, so today I did that. Got breakfast started, then went and woke her up, so breakfast would be ready when she came down. Emma is getting up too this week — an amazing feat for her, if you know her — so she dealt with upstairs and I dealt with downstairs and honestly it all went pretty well. My perfectly honed breakfast routine, developed over five years of breakfasts is out the window and I have to make a new one. There were many, many inefficiencies in this first pass. I accidentally made a peanut butter and honey sandwich (Emma’s sandwich) instead of peanut butter and jelly. There was a bad grape in her lunchbox (gasp!) I kept needing more knives. But all in all it went pretty well and it’s fun to think of all the ways I can improve its efficiency.
Then Emma took a picture of her at the front door — which was newly painted just for the occasion — and some more at the Lightning and away we went.
We have just returned from dropping her off. It was a whole family affair. I went, Emma went and Grammy went. Jane was very excited to get there. She did not like waiting in the car queue, which was long but not too long and our neighbor friend says it will get shorter. She was antsy and excited to get out. We spent the duration of the line bickering about line dynamics and whether or not the temporary change school management made to the car line actually made an impact. I was right, of course. I will not describe the question here in detail so that you, my wonderful audience, cannot politely inform me that I was, in fact wrong. There were PTA volunteers to take kids to the classrooms. You can’t get out of the car to help the kids. You can’t hug them goodbye, which I do not like one bit and Emma liked even less. As Grammy pointed out, the volunteers hold a lot of kids hands and Jane is probably already sick, ten minutes after the bell rang. Okay she did not put it exactly like that but point made.
And then just like that, she was gone, didn’t even look back. So excited.
Will that excitement remain? For a day? Week? Month? Year? Twelve years? Seems all but certain — but not definite — that the shine will dull at some point, but when?
We shall see.
Watched Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny last night and it was exactly like an Indiana Jones movie, which I suppose was smart, imagine how annoyed people would be if it were not exactly like an Indiana Jones movie. There were a lot of big action set pieces that left me bored and wondering if I would like them more or care about them more in the theater. There were some great cameos. There was 90 seconds or so of the most emotional, heartfelt and beautiful scenes in the entirety of the franchise and perhaps in Harrison Ford’s career. Those 90 seconds made it worth it and they really wouldn’t have worked as a 90-second feature film, so I suppose the rest of the film had a reason to exist. Emma picked up the film 44 minutes in and had zero problem whatsoever picking up the plot, so, you know.
But during the end credits I learned that Philip Kaufman (still alive, 86) created the original character/story with George Lucas and, um, well, I did not know that. If you go to Philip Kaufman’s Wikipedia page, the opening paragraph calls him “a ‘maverick’ and an ‘iconoclast,’ notable for his versatility and independence often directing eclectic and controversial films. He is considered an ‘auteur’ whose films have always expressed his personal vision.” It weirdly does not then say “oh and also he helped invent Indiana Jones.” Weird. Apparently George Lucas hired Kaufman to help him with the first screenplay, and Kaufman came up with the idea of using the Ark of the Covenant as the MacGuffin, which really has become a core part of the Indiana Jones concept. Anway, Philip Kaufman also made Henry and June, which we have been talking about of late. Philip Kaufman personally knew both Henry and Anaïs and that is a thing I did not know until today, so… wow. He also apparently directed some thriller called Twisted with Sam Jackson and Ashley Judd and a TV movie about Hemingway with Nicole Kidman that I have never heard of. Weird.
Apparently because of this Philip Kaufman gets a credit on every Indiana Jones movie, game, TV show. Crazytown. I wonder if he gets paid. I hope so.
Today’s Wikipedia K Hole was brought to you by Malt-o-meal. Still in business. Malt-o-meal.
Malt-o-meal factory is by Carleton College. Whole place smells like cereal.
Also finished Tenet yesterday, the movie I’d been working on during my nights of from Jane for, oh, a week or so. It made as little sense to me this time as it did the first time. One thing I do like about it is that it very much seems to be a hodgepodge of Nolan’s interests at the time. Like there’s a whole random subplot about art forgeries that didn’t need to be a thing, and ditto about freeports. It’s pretty clear Nolan just kinda thinks freeports are interesting?
Yesterday morning after I wrote to you I hit a snag with work and I couldn’t compose an email properly and I thought to myself “if I could go for a walk I could sort this out,” and then I realized that I could, in fact, go for a walk. It was only 9 AM and I had no appointments for another 90 minutes. So I did. And it was awesome. And you know what? I’m gonna do it again. I’m still ridiculously stressed and conflicted about Jane going to Kindergarten but that is not going to stop me from enjoying my newfound 60 extra minutes of free time.
W Hotel in a Better, Alternate Universe playlist for you on this issue number one thousand. Almost all new, except the last two. I pulled out that Prinzhorn album yesterday when I was doing some record organizing and forgot how much I love it. That song directly inspired the soundtrack music for my podcast. And I had had my Emperor’s New Clothes 12” out since the day Sinead died and hadn’t listened to it yet because I remember all the remixes being kinda milquetoast and… they are, but also they’re not bad and I kinda liked them more than I remembered. As for the new stuff I am pretty excited about this weird new Orb album with David Gilmour from Pink Floyd that is just weird but also the Orb are ollllld so I guess it makes snese. And Anjimile is a new 4AD signing apparently from Boston so that is cool, even though I’m not familiar with them. They name-checked TT The Bears on their 4AD introductory email, so good on them.
All right until tomorrow, friends.