Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1097
Future Islands, questions about the school year, my Kindle-Instapaper workflow, Newsweek of yore, Taylor is good at some things, Deleting Prime Video, the lyrics to New Dress
Good morning friend! Hello! How are you? Awesome? Middling? Leave a note in the comments. Like and subscribe to this channel. Thank you, Youtube, for the 1MM viewers plaque. I will make a whole video about it.
I am listening to the new Future Islands this morning. It sounds like the old Future Islands. I like the Future Islands. I do not love the Future Islands. They are from Carrboro, the town next to me. They once sent a demo to Archenemy records. Probably should have signed them. Big Elevator Drops fans, Future Islands.
Night and day from yesterday on Jane going to school this morning. Today was rainbow day. She was all over it.
I have thoughts about school:
First: am I imagining things or are five-day school weeks the exception rather than the rule? I feel like two out of three every school weeks has at least one day off. Was it like this when “we” were kids? It’s insane!
Also I am realizing I will never get used to waking up at 6:10 AM, because it basically never happens? It’s only 180 days out of the year — less than half the year. And I will have the entire summer to lose all of my good habits. This is somewhat disheartening. Jane will get faster at bedtime than she is now, for a while, but then she will get slower. So I can’t really count on a speedier morning routine. I suppose I can count on a more consistent morning routine, which would be nice because right now I’m padding the whole thing about a half hour to accommodate unexpected resistance: and yesterday showed that even that isn’t really enough. I suppose as she gets older she won’t, like, not go because she’s scared of super heroes. But it does seem conceivable that she will, like, not go because school is a complete waste of time.
Really not happy about the prospect of spending more than a decade in this situation.
Home school!
Had a dream last night that the Barbarian Boston office was moving and there was some mob connection which was fun. Doug and Mike were our liasons to the mob. I think they might have been our landlord or something? Anyway I am sure this was brought on because I re-watched the first half of Free Guy the other night, and the coffee shop in that movie is across from the last Boston Barbarian office.
Miss that place.
I’d say Free Guy was better than I remembered, but I remember the first half being good and the second half not being good, so I guess it’s exactly as good as I remembered, and I stopped at the right place.
Deleted the Amazon Prime app last night because those fuckers are trying to charge $2.99 a month for something I already paid for. It’s hilarious Bezos thinks that the Amazon Prime video app has achieved liftoff into the realm of “worth paying for.” It’s hilarious that Jeff Bezos — the twerp who gave an anti-advertising quote about how if you’re product isn’t good, you rely on advertising that every jagoff in Silicon Valley parrots right up until the day they start running ads — is relying on ads. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Anyway, I await the class action lawsuit about this and I will eagerly sign up for it and in three years get those free Kindle credits that I never use.
Emma told me the lyrics to “New Dress” by Depeche Mode yesterday and my god all these years I have been completely oblivious to the lyrics to “New Dress,” which are amazing and still relevant:
Sex jibe husband murders wife Bomb blast victim fights for life Girl thirteen attacked with knife Princess Di is wearing a new dress Jet airliner shot from sky Famine horror - millions die Earthquake terror figures rise Princess Di is wearing a new dress
(Substack has a poetry style I mean the love Nazis and all but poetry blocks are tight.)
Anyway I always thought it said something like “stitches hi you’re wearing a new dress” which never made a lot of sense.
Been slowly reading all the articles I “Instapapered” to my Kindle. Ever since I made my sweet Automator Action to automatically make a PDF of something and send it to my Kindle, I have been sending articles to my Kindle. Articles that are too long and I don’t have time to read now but want to read someday. Problem is I never found a time to actually read them. But I rijiggered my schedule slightly and now I get a couple hours a week to read them. Problem is, I’m reading oldest-first so everything is kind of out of date. Except it’s not really a problem, it’s actually kind of nice. About thirty percent of the articles I skip outright, because they are no longer relevant: the situation has resolved itself, or the facts on the ground have changed so much that the article is irrelevant. About 15% of the time I don’t really care about the topic anymore, about 15% of the time it turns out the article was like a 2-page long opinion piece with no news. But about 40% of the time, it’s awesome because the article is still super relevant, and time has told me I still care about this topic, and I am so ready to read a long think piece about it. I love it when that happens. Just read a long think piece about Sapporo ruining Anchor Steam and it turns out I still cared about that even though I never cared for Anchor Steam.
It all reminds me of when I was a teenager and I was kinda sloppy about keeping up on the news, so I would just read Newsweek or Time at the end of the week and get a decent overview of a topic. I mean, this was the 80’s they weren’t so bad then plus I was still a centrist and hadn’t realized the “view from nowhere” is BS. But still, you get my point. And this new personal version of Newsweek also knows that the “view from nowhere” and centrism are silly. So that is a bonus. I read a really long article about the milquetoastedness of Jack Antonoff which was deeply, deeply satisfying, and another one about the history of the Wagner group which was written between the coup and his death but somehow still feels relevant and interesting.
(Curious what’s up with the Wagner Group now bee tee dubs. Did they get subsumed into the mainline Russian military like the original plan?)
Bed Party and Daddy Jane Dance Party last night. Bed party consisted mainly of taking turns doing tricks, wherein Jane and Caticorn take turns doing a set of tricks, and then the other repeats them and if you do a great job repeating the trick set, I tickle you. This is a game Jane dreamed up. The rules are very, very complicated and getting more complicated by the day. Emma joined for a bit of Bed Party but she was not very happy about it. Good to dogpile onto her with Jane and a bunch of stuffies, though. You can’t pay for entertainment like that. DDJP is still too heavy on Taylor but I am making a bit of progress expanding her Taylor repretoire what choice do I have. We watched “Style” last night, which is a great tune but a terrible video, story of Taylor’s live.
Had an epiphany about Taylor last night and it seems so obvious in retrospect. She is good at some things and not others! She is a great live performer and a great songwriter. World class, top notch at both. She is great at PR and zeitgeist reading. She’s an absolutely terrible producer of records — I mean that at the highest level of choosing the producers because the sound of her songs just sucks. She’s not a very good film director. She’s a decent vocalist and dancer. I think Folklore and Evermore proved she is still not capable of writing songs from a third person point of view, at least not at the level of, say, Dolly Parton or something. She obviously has a monstrous work ethic which, you know, I deeply respect cuz I love a good work ethic.
And all of this is okay! She does not have to be great at everything.
This all seemed very much like an epiphany last night, as I found myself for the ten thousandth time wishing there was a single bit of feedback somewhere, anywhere, in a Taylor Swift song. But now I can’t say why.
Ugh I promised I wasn’t going to talk about Taylor today.
Anyway here is a cute picture of Jane.
Today’s media of the day is the new album by The Smile, Wall of Eyes. If you don’t know about the Smile, it is Thom Yorke of Radiohead’s new band. Except don’t let that fool you, because it is nothing like Radiohead and it is awesome. I first heard them about six months ago when they did a live set at the Montreaux Jazz Festival and I was listening to it and thought “woah this experimental prog postrock jazz band is awesome how have I never heard of them they must be like elder statesmen or something” figuring they were some Krautrock band from the 60’s. But nope, it turned out to be Thom Yorke’s new band. And now the debut album is out. And it rules. It is basically Pharoh Sanders meets Mogwai or something. It’s just awesome. I mean, do other bands do this thing? Yes. But unlike late-period Radiohead, where other bands do that thing but do it better, other bands do this thing too but The Smile do it every bit as well. Plus I like this particular thing better than the glitchy electronica thing that Radiohead do these days. No shade, I bought every Radiohead album. I just like this a lot better.
I am leaving a comment! "Wall of Eyes" is the Smile's second album, not their debut. Perhaps you missed 2022's "A Light for Attracting Attention" which I like more (for the moment).
Anyway, that's my comment. More rock n' roll fact-checking and opinions are available upon request.