Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1086
Cold, exciting eBay listings, my new substack footer, Tracy Pew's soul's age, digital highway sign hypocrisy from the USDOT, slow bed party, problematic Coachella trends
Good morning! Hello. How are you? All well? What’s today? Wednesday? Cool. Just back from dropping Jane off at school and the grocery store. G-Wagon was 5 places ahead of me today. Aggro van guy nowhere to be seen. Maybe they’re holed up in their bunker for the cold. It is 17 degrees out. It seems that is cold enough to trigger my long-dormant Alaskan genes, because I do not feel cold, and didn’t feel cold when I got out of the truck to go to the grocery store.
Had a dream where me and Miranda Brown had to get from Battery Park city to Greenpoint so we could meet Steve Albini at Pencil Factory before a show at St Vitus. We were late and the subways were down so we took the ferry and it was really nice. Sigh.
Gotta say, though: people can gripe about EVs and cold all they want, but the value of leaving your car running while you shop, without feeling guilty about the environment? Priceless. Starting your car 30 minutes before you leave, without feeling guilty? Priceless. Doubly so when your daughter refuses to wear a coat when leaving the house for school cuz one time it was hard to buckle up her seatbelt with a coat on.
Oh my god I have too many topics today it is overwhelming. Always a dilemma. I can blow my wad (was my long discourse about that phrase and whether it was dirty written in GMHAY? Or was that pre-GMHHAY? Anyway, everyone decided it can realistically be about money not just ejaculate so get your head out of the gutter, perv) all in one issue, assigning a paragraph or so to each. This is my normal urge. Or I could dole them out slowly, savoring them like people far more sophisticated than me do with fine wines.
Eh screw it here we go. As many as I can fit into a normal edition.
Some important eBay listings you might be interested in:
JA Mitchell Transcriptor Reference Hydraulic Turntable: the best condition I’ve seen one in in my fifteen years or so of having this eBay alert, since re-watching A Clockwork Orange drunk in my old SoHo loft. Lotta replaced parts. Gotta wonder when every one of these for sale will be a version of Washington’s axe, with every part having been replaced, but still a vintage Reference Hydraulic. Still, if you have $3k to spare, there are worse ways to spend it (I’m adding a grand for shipping).
Quantel Graphic Paintbox V-Series: A massively influential, yet under-appreciated piece of graphic design history, a dedicated graphics computer that blew comparable Macs of the day away in processing power and graphics prowess. In my personal pantheon, it is most notable for being the machine that inspired and powered Vaughan Oliver’s early 90’s forays into digital design, including the great Ultra Vivid Scene 12” covers and the typeface-addled cover to Pale Saints’ In Ribbons. It is in working condition. Been a long, long time since one of these babies hit eBay in this good of condition.
June Oven: I only put this here because the June Oven is my absolute favorite kitchen gadget ever, and they no longer make them, and I am super stressed that mine is going to break and I have been shopping for backups. They’ve typically gone for about list on eBay since production stopped. This is the first one I’ve seen anyone try and sell one above list as some sort of collector’s item, which I agree with in theory but am adamantly against in practice.
We are listening to an ambient artist named Chuck Johnson today. Don’t know much about him. But it is a lovely album. It is a second listen. Actually I just googled him and there is a New York Times feature about him that calls this 2017 album I am listening to, Balsams, his breakthrough. Well okay then. I am late to the party. It makes me want a pedal steel.
We are down to 24 hours 30 minutes in the 2023 investigate playlist. I hope to make a bigger dent today. Had a lot of calls yesterday.
Got a few great comments about my boring-ass single-topic edition yesterday whining about Substack. First I got a few people who know the founders decently and reassure me that my assessment of their, um, mental prowess is not incorrect. More intriguingly, Tim wrote in to suggest that I add an item to the footer of this newsletter explaining why I’m still on Substack, linking to yesterday’s post. This is a great idea, and I have done it, and I get the extra chuckle at knowing that Substack is spending money emailing a bunch of people every day that they are doofuses. Thank you, Tim.
If you have a non-paid Substack, consider doing the same. Or, heck, even a paid one.
There’s an article going around talking about how the US Highway Administration is telling states they can no longer have humorous signs on the highway about drunk driving or whatnot. I love these signs — I thoroughly enjoyed them on my recent drive up to Boston. I am against this. It makes me sad. But that is not what I’m here to say. I am here to point out a bitter irony. The government is saying, not unreasonably, that these signs can be misunderstood by second-language citizens, etc. This is true. What is hilarious, though, is that in the manual where this new order comes down, is this passage:
Examples of traffic safety campaign messages include “UNBUCKLED SEAT BELTS FINE + POINTS”
Yes we would not want unclear messages to have “obscure or secondary meanings” let’s be very clear in telling drivers that it is totally fine to have unbuckled seatbelts and you get extra points in the game for them.
As far as I can tell I am the only one who has noticed this and boy howdy do I wish someone would write an article about it. (It’s page 519 if you want to look in the above-linked PDF).
Moving on. I made some soup. It is delicious. I have been eating soup out of the slow cooker for three days now. I am so happy. How long can soup stay in a slow cooker? Forever, right? It is the best. It’s just your basic chicken noodle soup, but it is from home made organic bone broth and does not have too much salt and it just rules and I am very happy about it. Soup! Soup!
The Coachella lineup is out and some of you may remember that I went to Coachella for, oh, ten years or so. And you may also remember that I still listen to an ungodly number of albums a year. And you may also remember that Emma and I even went on the Coachella cruise and I sat and watched a panel discussion, on a m-f-in cruse ship, from the head of Goldenvoice (who seemed pretty cool). I consider myself something of an amateur Coachella expert and my official take on this year’s lineup is: meh. And mind you, it’s not like I don’t know the bands. I am familiar with bands down to the tiniest print this is not an “old people” thing. I think Coachella has lost something by ghettoizing the goth and new wave into Cruel World. The headliners, Lana aside, are not that popular to justify their non-alternativeness (like Madonna or Prince, etc), and they are all by and large current acts, no mind-blowing reunions. Except for the mysterious placement of No Doubt, which would be a legit Coachella headliner, except they’re not listed on a specific day! What the hell is this? Goldenvoice, the promoter, did the exact same thing with Tones on Tail at this year’s Cruel World and I am 100% against this new trend in festival lineup announcements, and though I no longer count any festivals as clients, I must officially protest this move. We must nip it in the bud.
The current-act thing is not a huge deal but what it does is make Coachella not worthy of travel. Which, I guess, fine. The thing sells out, its aspirations have transitioned from global to regional. If SoCal can provide enough bodies to sell out two weekends, what does it need people flying over from the East Coast for? Fine by me, I suppose. More opportunity for an east coast promoter to convince Oasis to reform.
Been working on the server rack in the storage room (more on that in a subsequent issue) and I spent, like, three hours trying to find rackmount adaptors for the ethernet switch, which is currently sitting on a shelf on the rack but keeps getting pulled off. And I could not find any of the right length on the internet. But then I found a listing for my specific rack model on another site, NewEgg, that had other photos and the photos informed me that my switch came with right-sized rack adaptors when you purchase it. I purchased it six years ago. BUT. I still had the box. So I went to the box storage area, found the ethernet switch box, opened it up, and there were the rack adaptors. Six years later.
Tell me I don’t deserve some kind of award for that.
Watched the Birthday Party documentary, Mutiny in Heaven the other night. And it was good, it was fine. Learned a couple things. Some good footage I’d never seen, and a bunch I had, including the fantastic TV appearance featured on the The Pleasureheads must Burn VHS wherein Tracy Pew falls backwards onto the drum riser while playing his bass, sticks his head into the kick drum, starts humping the air, and never even breaks the beat. And Nick is holding a glass of whiskey and a cigarette in the same hand while singing, and he sort of just glances over at Tracey without any surprise whatsover. That video had a very profound impact on me in ‘93 or so.
But the thing is, back then, Tracy Pew looked like a monster. Moustage, mesh vest, leather trousers, cowboy hat. He looked ragged and worn and tough and badass. I was kind of scared of him.
But now? Now he just looks like a baby! It is so hilarious. Like, dude is probably not a day over thirty when that was shot. Probably more like 25, 26. Of course, I was probably 20 or so when I first saw it, so he would have looked so old, so wise.
Poor Tracy never had a chance to age into the person his soul always was. He died maybe three years after that video was shot, from head injuries sustained during an epileptic seizure.
It got me thinking about my god, imagine Tracy Pew’s gravitas in his forties. When his body and experience aged into his soul’s innate age. It would have been insane.
And that got me thinking about that Black Rebel Motorcycle Club show I saw a few years back where exactly that had happened: the band was now as old as their style and music, and they had now been touring for twenty years and it just made the thing better, more real, more patina’ed, aged like a fine wine.
RIP Tracy Pew.
Also Nick saying the only groups they had any affinity for were the Fall and the Pop Group makes me very skeptical. You’re telling me they felt nothing for Joy Division, doubly so with both bands having an epileptic? C’mon man.
Jane is feeling much better. After I left you yesterday, I stopped everything and we sat in a chair together with her hugging me, for about an hour. Then in the evening at bedtime we were doing bed party, but she was so tired, so we agreed to do “slow bed party” which very rapidly lead to her falling asleep in my arms and us sleeping curled up on the bed together for an hour before I tucked her in and my god it was a top ten parenting moment, let me tell you.
Okay well I guess that’s enough for today. I have like six topics left but we need to stop we have a meeting at nine.
Today’s media of the day is this new Mary Timony single, Dominoes. New album out soon. Forever stan Mary Timony from our BU days, where she was just the cute girl in Veggie I was always too shy to talk to.
Two minutes till the call. Made it. Until tomorrow!
I recently saw a recent picture of Steve Albini and he looked like he'd be a neighbor to Archie Bunker.
Which led to, "Hey Arch, tell Edith I'm tracking drums in the garage this weekend."
Many years ago, at Tape Op in New Orleans, an audience member asked him, during a Q&A how he mic'd high-hats. The poor kid was destroyed for such a question....Other friends of mine, that were also there, still remember it.